Mike Johnson Says Pope Was Asking for It

House Speaker Mike Johnson has come out on the side of the White House in its recent aggression toward the Vatican, suggesting that Pope Leo XIV had it coming.

“A pontiff or any religious leader can say anything they want, but obviously if you wade into political waters, I think you should expect some political response and I think the pope has received some of that,” Johnson said Wednesday.

Last week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had openly threatened an ambassador of the Holy See in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address. In the days since that report, Donald Trump has fired off several antagonistic comments against the leader of the Catholic Church, repeatedly trying to sour the pope’s reputation by claiming that Leo is “terrible for foreign policy” and “weak on crime.” That is despite the fact that religious leaders are neither responsible for foreign policy nor in charge of lowering crime rates.

“I was taken a little bit aback, just honestly, frankly, by something that he said, I think he said several days back, something about ‘those who engage in war, Jesus doesn’t hear their prayers’ or something,” Johnson continued.

The Republican House leader was referring to the pope’s Palm Sunday Mass, in which the pontiff said that “Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

Johnson went on to preach against the highest Catholic’s teachings, claiming that it’s a “very well settled matter of Christian theology” that war is sometimes justified, and invoking the “just war” doctrine within military ethics.

The House speaker added that Iran was the “largest sponsor of terrorism” in the world and that the Trump administration’s siege had potentially saved “millions of innocent people” from “being killed by terrorists.”

The war has so far cost the lives of more than 3,000 people in Iran, including dozens of political leaders, reported Reuters. At least 13 U.S. soldiers have also been killed, and nearly 400 have been wounded, according to U.S. Central Command.

Meanwhile, gas prices in the U.S. have surged beyond $4 a gallon. In five states—California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington—gas has risen above an average of $5 a gallon. The soaring price has driven up the cost of practically everything else, as inflated transportation and shipping costs get off-loaded to the customer.

Trump imposed a formal blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil tradeway between Iran and Oman, on Tuesday, and has promised repeatedly that the war is “very close to being over.” In the same breath, however, he added that his administration is “not finished” with Iran.

“We’ll see what happens,” Trump told Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo Wednesday.

Despite President Trump claiming that the war is almost over, the U.S. is sending thousands more soldiers to the Middle East.

The Washington Post reports that about 6,000 troops are heading to the region on the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier, and about 4,200 troops from the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group and 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which can conduct limited ground operations, will arrive in the region at the end of the month. There are already an estimated 50,000 U.S. soldiers in the Middle East, and a two-week ceasefire with Iran is set to expire April 22 unless a peace deal is reached.

Negotiations between Iran and the U.S. could resume this week in Pakistan after hitting an impasse over nuclear enrichment. But Trump’s new blockade on Iranian ports, aimed at forcing Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by squeezing its economy, may not help the situation. Still, the president told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that he thinks the war with Iran is “close to over, yeah. I view it as very close to being over.”

“You know what? If I pulled up stakes right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild that country, and we’re not finished. We’ll see what happens. I think they want to make a deal very badly,” Trump said.

Is Trump planning to escalate the war by sending more troops, or is he trying to intimidate Iran into agreeing to terms more favorable to the U.S.? It’s impossible to say, as Trump is unpredictable and impatient. In fact, it was he who begged for the ceasefire in the first place. The question is whether he’s willing to continue an unpopular war that’s hurting the economy and his poll numbers.

Kansas Senator Roger Marshall has doubled down on his delusional pitch for voters to get excited about higher gas prices.

Speaking to CNN Tuesday evening, Marshall was asked if he actually expected his constituents to buy into his earlier claim that national security was “more important than your pocketbook.”

Marshall insisted that Kansans understood the “long game,” and that things could be a lot worse if the United States had not attacked Iran.

“I would argue that if Iran ever had nuclear weapons, and then they controlled the Strait of Hormuz, that gasoline would be $10 a gallon,” Marshall said. “The good news, what gas in America right now is $3.14 a gallon on average, something—oh no, $4.14, forgive me, $4.14 a gallon. In Europe right now it’s $7 a gallon. So, it’s not great. I’m concerned about it.”

Of course, experts say Iran was nowhere near having nuclear weapons. And while the country didn’t control the flow of trade through the Strait of Hormuz before, it certainly does now.

Meanwhile, the “short-term sacrifice” Marshall describes is hurting Americans—and his own party’s chances at reelection. A recent poll from CBS News/YouGov found that 51 percent of Americans found gas prices presented a significant financial hardship. At the beginning of April, Donald Trump’s approval on the economy hit a new low, and gas prices have only continued to climb.

But Marshall claimed there was an upside to paying more at the pump.

“The good news is we’re the largest oil producer in the world right now. That we’re a net exporter,” he said, as if average Americans would ever benefit from oil executives’ war profiteering. That’s sure to be a winning message for the midterm elections in November—hey, we should get this guy a regular spot on Fox News!

During an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, Donald Trump was unable to remember when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died—once again raising questions about the president’s mental acuity.

“Look at [what] happens to Justice Ginsburg. She was not exactly a young woman. The election was taken. They had a Democrat who could’ve appointed a liberal justice—and the liberals do stick together, that’s one thing about those justices, they stick together like glue, not like the Republicans,” Trump said in an interview that aired on Wednesday morning. “But she decided that she was gonna live forever, and about two minutes after the election, she went out. And I got to appoint somebody.… She really hurt herself within the Democrat Party.”

Trump is very wrong here. Ginsburg died in September 2020, well before the general election, and he replaced her with Amy Coney Barrett before his 2020 election loss, which went directly against Ginsburg’s dying wish.

Trump shared the factually incorrect story in response to a question about the possibility of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, 76, stepping down while Republicans still control the Senate—appearing to warn the justice that his time is at an end.

The flub is a cherry on top of what has been an absolutely awful few weeks for Trump’s mental fitness, and it’s only Wednesday. From his weird AI posts depicting himself as or with Jesus Christ, to saying the pope is “weak on crime,” to threatening to wipe out an entire civilization, the president seems to be unraveling at a faster rate than usual.

It’s shocking that Trump could even forget Ginsburg’s death. His raw, cinematic reaction to it on an airport tarmac—with Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” playing in the background—was perhaps one of the most iconic moments of his first term.

Sebastian Gorka is angling to become the next head of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Gorka, a former Breitbart News editor and conservative radio personality, has served as a deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council since January 2025.

The London-born Hungarian has been a fixture in Donald Trump’s inner circle since 2017, though his appointment to Trump’s first administration came as a surprise to many in his field. Gorka had previously been known for his extremist Islamophobic views, which relegated him to the fringes of Washington. Even during Trump’s first term, Gorka’s work was stunted after he failed to obtain the security clearance necessary to actually work on national security issues.

The position at the National Counterterrorism Center has been open since Joe Kent resigned last month over the war in Iran. In his exit letter, Kent argued that Iran “posed no imminent threat” to the U.S., and that there was no available intel suggesting that Iran was trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Gorka does not agree. Last month, he told the Council on Foreign Relations that he believed Operation Epic Fury would “solve perhaps the most trenchant and strategic terrorist threat the world faces today.”

Four people familiar with Gorka’s potential political ascension told The Washington Post Wednesday that it would give him “broad powers over the country’s vast counterterrorism apparatus.”

His influence could make the country a hostile place for anyone the administration deems a leftist. At the National Security Council, Gorka has advocated to expand the definition of terrorist threats to include far-left groups. His work bore a result: In September, the White House branded antifa—a catchall for self-described antifascists—a terrorist organization. The executive order deemed antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” although the Post reported that no such label exists in federal law.