As this week got underway, the White House apparently wanted to focus on tax policy. Donald Trump made sure that didn’t happen, shifting the focus instead to his latest controversies related to religion.

On Sunday night, the president not only publicly slammed Pope Leo XIV, but the Republican also decided to use his social media platform to promote an image that appeared to present himself as some kind of American Jesus.

As is often the case, it fell to JD Vance to try to help clean up the mess. Unfortunately for the vice president, that didn’t go especially well.

On the image that drew rebukes from many of Trump’s own political allies, Vance told Fox News, “I think the president was posting a joke. And of course he took it down because he recognized that a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor in that case. I think the president of the United States likes to mix it up on social media.”

The problem with this sad defense is that we know it’s untrue. We know this for certain because Trump said so: Hours before Vance’s on-air comments, the president specifically told reporters that he wasn’t trying to be funny but rather promoted the image because, as he put it, “I thought it was me as a doctor. … It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better.”

To be sure, that defense was quite bonkers given the relevant details, but it was also the opposite of the defense his vice president brought to a national television audience.

It was at this point that Vance also decided to weigh in on Trump’s offensive against the pontiff.

The nation’s first-ever Catholic Republican vice president not surprisingly sided with his boss over the head of his church, but what was notable was how Vance presented his case.

After suggesting that policy disagreements between U.S. administrations and the Vatican are not “particularly newsworthy,” the vice president added, “I certainly think that in some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of, you know, what’s going on in the Catholic Church, and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”

In case this isn’t obvious, the pope drew Trump’s ire by speaking out on matters such as a deadly and destabilizing war in the Middle East and the plight of immigrants seeking a better life. Whether Vance appreciates this or not, those are, by any reasonable measure, “matters of morality.”

If the pope pontificated on the future of the Senate’s filibuster rule, that would likely be seen as an unfortunate intrusion into domestic political affairs. But for the vice president to argue that wars and the plight of immigrants were out of bounds, making it Leo’s fault that Trump went after him, was simply embarrassing.

Or, more to the point, it was the latest in a series of humiliations for the beleaguered vice president.

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