Why Catholics Must Vote Trump to Save Themselves and America: The Catholic Case for Trump

Over the past four years, Catholic Americans have been targeted by name: by the FBI in the Richmond memo is the most famous.  And Catholic Americans have been hunted by the DOJ.  They have been targeted by the fake news media hitting them with quotes by the Pope.  More than ever, a national election will decide the fate of Catholic Americans.  Catholic Americans must choose to save themselves and our nation.

The Catholic vote has long been a desirable if somewhat enigmatic constituency for presidential candidates given their bellwether tendencies, in which they more often than not — like moderates or Independents — choose the winning candidate.  In 2016, for example, Donald Trump won the Catholic vote 52% to 45%.  In 2020, some pollsters claimed Biden won back this demographic, 52% to 47%, although these results, of course, are far less reliable — and the more accurate breakdown is that President Trump won 50% to 49% — given the widespread fraud that impacted that race. 

Nevertheless, for all sorts of reasons, over the past eighty years Catholic voters have proven to be a crucial voting demographic. In the Trump era, they have outsized importance, considering their large concentrations in a handful of key battleground states distributed throughout the rustbelt and sunbelt.  According to a 2014 Pew study detailing religious identification, Catholics comprised 24% of Pennsylvania’s overall population, almost four points above the national average.  Broken down by party affiliation, 43% of Pennsylvania Catholics are registered Republicans, compared with 46%, who are registered Democrats. 

The Catholic demographic is similarly higher than the national average in Wisconsin, another critical battleground with its 11 electoral votes, where about 25% of the population identifies as Catholic.  Catholics also command higher than average numbers in Arizona (21%) and Nevada (25%), with their growing Hispanic populations. America’s Hispanic population, the majority of whom hail from Catholic countries and territories like Mexico, Colombia, and Puerto Rico, has over just a few short decades become a formidable voter bloc, and could well prove to be the decider of this November’s election.

The stakes for Catholic voters – much like the rest of the country – are the highest they have been in generations, entering this tumultuous presidential contest.  First, of the candidates running, Donald Trump, albeit not a Catholic himself, has immediate family members, including First Lady Melania and his son, Barron, who are baptized and practicing members of the Church.  A part of his biography that is often overlooked is the two years he attended Fordham University in the 1960s, a Jesuit college, before transferring to UPenn’s Wharton School of Business, where he matriculated.  Nevertheless, the 45^th President was surely catechized with at least a foretaste, even if indirectly, of Catholicism and its rigorous core curriculum at a formative age, at a time when the Fordham education was far more adherent to the tenets of the faith and serious devotion to Western classics.

Whether or not President Trump still consciously reflects on these early years is unknown, but he does occasionally pay homage to Catholicism and certain essentially Catholic shrines and iconography on the campaign trail. For example, on September 8th, the President posted a photo of the Blessed Mother on Truth Social and X, on the feast day commemorating her birthday. A little over a week later, his campaign announced that he would pay a visit to The National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, a Catholic church in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, with the president of Poland, Andrzej Duda. Although the campaign stop has been put on halt, due to elevated concerns stemming from the recent second assassination attempt on President Trump’s life a week ago, the gesture was a grand one by Trump for Catholic Americans. (The church’s namesake derives from the famous Polish icon of the Blessed Mother, the “Black Madonna,” in reference to the darker coloration of the Marian depiction. Mary’s role in deeply Catholic Poland cannot be overstated; for over six centuries she has been venerated by Poles as “Our Lady, Queen of Poland.” The particular devotion in Czestochowa was commemorated after the Blessed Mother was said to have intervened and saved the now famous monastery of Jasna Góra from being ransacked by the Swedes in the winter of 1655. A century later, Pope Clement XI issued a Pontifical decree of canonical coronation to the image, which churches across the world, including the one in Pennsylvania where President Trump intended on visiting, now celebrate.)

President Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, a Catholic himself, has written extensively about his conversion to the faith in adulthood, which consummated with his marriage.  Vance’s much written about spiritual journey was itself a years-long process, part intellectual, part devotional – a genuine embracing of the faith that is so foreign in the Cafeteria Catholicism that permeates Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden’s Washington, DC.  Whereas the latter is nauseatingly inauthentic and cloying, Vance’s Catholicism seems the natural byproduct of a genuine conversion, one that does not observe the future vice president adorn himself in the label for expediency’s sake, but relishes in the Church’s rich tradition and mysteries, which in turn serve as a genuine lodestar for his politics. This sharply contrasts with Joe Biden’s makeshift faith, who throughout his public career adjusted his religion to befit his politics, not the other way around, invariably making himself palatable to those faithless constituencies of the Democratic Party, an increasingly large share of their voter base, who shun organized religion and the antiquarian doctrines and rigid duties demanded of it. It even further diverges from Kamala’s faith, which, for all intents and purposes, is nonexistent (apart from her personal devotion to the Gospel of Woke) — and worse than that, ostensibly vindictive towards sincere religious worshipers.

We see that the Biden Catholic haters are arresting pro-life protesters and putting them in federal prison under the FACE Act.  We have seen Biden continue to target nuns (as Obama did).  And the attacks on our girls’ sports is feminism writ large and will impact Catholic education.  Kamala has made it clear she will continue all of this and more. 

Accordingly, Catholics are poised once again to play an important role in this year’s election.  Pope Francis’ recent remarks to American Catholics only underscore that point.  In a controversial public statement, the pontiff implored Catholics to vote, as a matter of civic duty, but he also warned that both candidates this year, in clashing ways, deviate from the Church’s doctrines, particularly on the question of life.  For Kamala Harris, of course, His Holiness’ gripe is with her inflexible, even dogmatic, pro-abortion stance, a position that now has made late third-trimester abortion, up to and even past the point of childbirth, legal in a handful of states.  For Catholics, especially, it remains an article of faith that life begins at conception.  Thus, abortion is perceived in the overwhelming majority of cases as a mortal sin and nonnegotiable evil. 

Kamala’s anti-life agenda goes beyond just the grave evil of abortion to myriad other anti-life policies.  In the past, she has been an ardent enthusiast, indeed evangelist, for gender-reassignment surgery – even to the point of denying parents the fundamental right to make decisions about their children’s healthcare, instead always preferring the “expertise” of public authorities to override those choices.  Kamala’s politics further align with those who believe school children should be exposed to woke propaganda, including radical gender and sex ideologies, starting from kindergarten age in many cases.  The propaganda more often than not resembles pornography, a truer descriptor of what it is, and the putative claim – to educate young children about human sexuality – masquerades a more sinister motive to groom and indoctrinate young children with degenerate mantras.  This would in turn create a generation of spiritually if not physically castrated conformists, rather than strong, Christian leaders, soldiers of Jesus Christ, made weak by the demoralizing creeds of the government-run school system.

Those noxious creeds that Kamala espouses on the campaign trail would not cease with the self-hating, anti-Christian, anti-life ideologies of the public school (her disrespect for Catholics knows no bounds, the latest case of which being her decision to spurn the Al Smith dinner).  Her ideology drives her to tear down any reminder of the greatness of Christian civilization, personified above all in the heroic lives of saints and martyrs that represent the apex of that hallowed tradition, preferring the secular saints of George Floyd and Barack Obama in their stead.  In this respect, Kamala is the perfect ambassador for the woke theology, the counterfeit religion that threatens to displace traditional morality with a new canon of ethics, one based on the antithesis of Christian doctrine, creating a mockery of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church along the way.

Even though the Pope, himself a globalist who pushes the boundaries of heresy on the regular, tossed stones at President Trump for his call to close the southern border, most American Catholics would rightly discern the pope’s position as shortsighted, even provincial.  First and foremost, it fails to fully appreciate the long-term benefits of a closed border stance – the humanitarian advantages that would accrue to the entire population at large, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, with significantly amped up border security. 

Importantly, such a policy would put an immediate stop to the escalating human trafficking crisis at the border, a human rights catastrophe, which often involves exploiting the most vulnerable members of society – women and children – who are sold off into criminal gangs or become victims of cartel violence and sex slavery.  These are some of the most horrific crimes now occurring anywhere in the world.  Thus, one can argue that the correct stance, the one most in keeping with a perspective towards Catholic ethics and human rights, would be a policy of border restrictionism, for that is the only defensible posture that would put this crisis to a categorical stop. 

Fewer border crossers infiltrating the country from abroad would mean less crime at home.  More resources as well to be devoted towards native-born Americans, including the hundreds of thousands of homeless people – many of whom are veterans in need of vital medical and other care.  Also sharing in that lot are the elderly, including many racial minorities, who would be better served with a closed border so that resources might be more efficiently allocated towards their needs.  Finally, America’s underclass – the indigent wage laborers who toil day in and day out to earn a living in a system of ever-widening inequities between rich and poor – would also benefit from a closed border, where the present policy cruelly and inhumanely forces them to compete with foreign laborers for lower wages – an affront to the dignity of human life and work in every possible sense.

President Trump – continuing his pro-life agenda – is the peace candidate, not just domestically, but overseas.  Under his presidency, the world was at peace to a degree that has no precedent in the eight decades since World War II.  Russia was kept at bay; the Middle East was overall stable; ISIS was in retreat; Chinese aggression into Taiwan and other places was significantly mitigated; North Korea had stopped launching ballistic missiles.  All that has changed in fewer than four years under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ administration – who espouse unapologetically hawkish views abroad. Maybe the pope was not paying attention to Kamala’s gushy embrace of the endorsements of diehard neocons, like Dick Cheney, the architect of the disastrous Iraq invasion, a war that cost tens of thousands of American lives, which Kamala did in her debate against President Trump.  

She also follows Barack Obama’s heels in promoting a kind of latter-day ideological neocolonialism — forcing all sorts of indignities on unwilling, mostly non-white countries abroad, like gay marriage in Nigeria or feminism in Saudi Arabia. These sorts of policies will only further the spread of global division and distrust, precipitating more needless crises where none previously existed. They are also inconsistent with the Church’s millennia-old doctrine on war – just war theory, which began with one of the greatest Christian doctors and saints, St. Augustine.  St. Augustine urged that wars of aggression were always immoral; war was only a means (and a last resort means at that) to further peace.  If the objective of a war was not peace – accomplished in the swiftest and most efficient way practicable – the war was unjust. 

President Trump, as the only candidate to not begin a new war during his presidency, stands in diametric opposition to Kamala Harris, the candidate of war – both at home, where her rhetoric has sown division among the body politic.  And abroad, where her slipshod negotiating skills triggered a cascading parade of horribles, starting with the greatest foreign policy blunder in living memory in the Biden administration’s catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal, which left 13 American troops dead.  From there, Putin was inspired just months later to invade Crimea – and the rest is history.  Now we are on the verge of World War III, with conflicts spanning Eastern Europe to the Middle East, a terrifying prospect, made worse by the power of nuclear weapons, which our adversaries now have in abundance, and which serve as a literal ticking time bomb that could with one mistake usher forth the Apocalypse in real time. 

Pollsters have told these authors that a surprising number of Catholic voters saw Joe Biden as friendly to them despite his administration’s subversive actions.  They saw Biden as an old time Catholic pol – amiable, if a little slow.  But with Biden gone, no Catholic can see in Kamala anything friendly or helpful.  And with the move by RFK, Jr. to Trump, many Catholics see this as permission to move from Kennedy Democrat to voting Trump.

On the ballot in mere weeks from now, Americans will have a choice between good and evil – as clear a contrast of choices as at any point in our history.  Kamala Harris is the candidate who has weaponized the justice system – and the Constitution – to target political opponents with impunity.  This includes co-opting intelligence agencies, like the FBI and DOJ, to clamp down on Latin Mass attending Catholics in Washington, DC, whose rituals, prayers, and liturgies are deemed blasphemous in the eyes of the regnant powers that be and the de facto woke religion of the state. 

Amidst this chaos, one is well-advised returning to the Bible for guidance. There is a concept in Christianity, originating in St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, referred to as the Katechon, which literally translates to he who restrains or withholds the son of perdition from his arrival.  While good Christians will never profess to “know that day or hour” of the Second Coming, the increasingly apocalyptic cadence of our politics and spiraling geopolitical situation decisively begets a state of affairs suffused with Biblical and eschatological import.  We are told, as good Christians, to not “Immanentize the eschaton,” or accelerate the chaos and disorder which might bring about conflict, at home and abroad. Accordingly, between the candidate with a track record for peace and the candidate of chaos, the preferred choice — or, at the bare minimum — “the lesser of the two evils,” in the Pope’s clumsy phrasing, could not be more clear.

That countless religious people – but Christians and Catholics, in particular – recognize the great apostasies occurring in real time throughout the world, and how Donald Trump appears to be guided by the hand of Providence, having now survived two attempts on his life already, would suggest entirely novel terrain that our politics has entered.  In other words, we have reached a point in history that so defies anything we are familiar with – so beyond precedent, even judging by the events of the past few months – that it behooves us to reflect more deeply about politics as such, rethink traditional empirical or secular categories in the process, and understand the battles we presently wage are beyond what can be understood in the earthly realm alone – one that requires our sights to be focused on something greater than all of us. It is hence the responsibility of faithful Christians everywhere to discern that God continues to work in mysterious ways, anointing imperfect vessels to accomplish His will on earth, for the sake of the greater good and for all people, Catholic and non-Catholic, of good will. 

Paul Ingrassia is an Attorney; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.