Pope Leo got his comms makeover. Now Trump needs his

2026 has been a banner year for news at the intersection of American politics, the Catholic Church, and the news media.

This week, another unexpected turn: Montse Alvarado, EWTN News president (and my former boss), was tapped to take over the Vatican communications department. The 39-year-old Mexican American will now oversee the entire media network of the Holy See, including the Holy See press office, Vatican News, the Vatican Publishing House, and several other media entities.

The move shocked the Catholic press. The relationship between EWTN and the Vatican strained nearly to the point of snapping during the Francis papacy. Prominent EWTN personalities such as Raymond Arroyo became rabid critics of Francis’s theological and pastoral direction. In the eyes of many, the network became a bunker for Catholics who felt Francis was operating with little regard for the tradition they had spent their lives practicing and defending.

The feelings were mutual. Without naming EWTN directly, Francis said in 2021, “There is, for example, a large Catholic television channel that has no hesitation in continually speaking ill of the pope. I personally deserve attacks and insults because I am a sinner, but the Church does not deserve them. They are the work of the devil. I have also said this to some of them.”

For those unfamiliar with Vatican press relations, that was the equivalent of a declaration of war. Which makes the decision to give Alvarado the keys to the Vatican’s communication department not merely improbable but nearly miraculous.

Church watchers immediately took to social media to register their surprise, and their theories. Conservatives took it as a sign of Leo’s intent to issue clearer and firmer moral guidelines than Francis. Progressives, stung and grasping for something positive, emphasized Alvarado’s identity as the first laywoman to ever become a prefect of a Vatican dicastery. The political media wondered whether it was an olive branch to American conservatives following the pope’s dust-up with President Donald Trump.

And so on. And it all might be partially true.

But having worked directly under Alvarado, and even played the reporter to her anchor on TV, I’ll offer a simpler explanation: She is a formidable person and uniquely qualified for the role. And she will put a charge into the Vatican communications machine, which for years has been a case study in institutional arrogance and incompetence, especially on matters concerning sexual abuse.

How bad was it, exactly? An illustrative example: The retiring prefect of the Vatican’s dicastery for communication, Paolo Ruffini, insisted on keeping the artwork of monstrous sexual predator Marko Rupnik on display years after his shocking crimes came to light, telling the Pillar in 2024 that removing it was “not the Christian response.”

With Alvarado, the Church has finally gotten this one right.

Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump. (AP Photos)

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, another powerful institution has been mishandling crises and handing its critics every headline they need. The Trump administration has been losing the news cycle so consistently that its approval ratings have stopped fluctuating and begun to settle at around 40%.

The decline isn’t irreversible yet, but it will be soon. And with 900-plus days remaining in Trump’s second term, the prospect of an extended lame-duck presidency is growing.

That’s terrible news for Trump’s legacy and for a nation that has suffered under a dysfunctional government for much of the first quarter of the century.

Part of the solution should be upending the White House’s communications program.

The fundamental problem is Trump’s poor performance in office this term, that’s beyond dispute. His failure to lower the cost of living or secure a meaningful victory in Iran stands to tarnish his second-term legacy, and perhaps his larger legacy. But it’s the communications malpractice that’s turned this rocky term into a perceived catastrophe, and which actively prevents the administration from climbing out of the hole.

Consider the economy, where the administration has real accomplishments to sell, and no idea how to sell them. The latest job data show 172,000 new positions created in May, more than twice what economists expected. The stock market is healthy. The GDP is growing modestly. But high inflation, driven by high gas prices and expensive housing, makes voters deeply skeptical that any of it is working in their favor.

A good communications strategy would take all of this into account. It would play up the successes while meeting voters where they are, gas is expensive, groceries are still painful, and then make the case that the numbers are starting to move in the right direction.

But the Trump White House appears capable of playing only a single note: See! We told you! America is the hottest country in the world! Never seen anything like it!

And if you don’t think so, both you and Kaitlan Collins need to learn how to smile.

Trump isn’t going to learn to sing in a different register at this point. He is incapable of projecting empathy and inspiring people toward something higher than righteous grievance. He’s the anti-JFK, he doesn’t ask people what they can do for their country, only if they’re tired of winning yet.

That’s a problem for a communications team to work around, not to imitate and amplify. Heralding the “Golden Age” with each morsel of positive economic news is substantively indistinguishable from Biden’s insistence that the economy was stronger than Americans felt. And we all know how that ended.

White House messaging on the war in Iran has been even more dismal. To this day, the “why” of the war has never been fully articulated. The public understands that Iran cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon, but not what a nuclear Iran would mean for America. Why exactly is this our fight? They never helped Americans connect those dots.

A competent communications director would have done so before we sent warships to the Middle East. Now, it’s too late to rally the public to support the level of military engagement necessary to depose the Iranian regime. Americans never fully understood this war and have resolutely rejected it.

Both problems, affordability and the war in Iran, are rooted in failed policy: Trump’s ill-conceived tariff regime and his unwillingness to commit to a winning strategy in Iran. But they are exacerbated by criminally inept and arrogant messaging.

And that’s only the beginning of the larger communications failure of this administration. Trump’s social media threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight” in reference to Iran gave every critic of the war a perfect headline and made every ally wince. Stephen Miller’s dishonest claim that Alex Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin” in Minnesota, reposted by Vice President JD Vance and parroted by then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, dealt a serious blow to public support for the administration’s deportation efforts, a problem made worse by dark social media posts by the official DHS accounts threatening to deport one-third of the population. The empty Epstein files binder handed out to right-wing influencers lent credibility to conspiracy theories about Trump attempting to cover up the convicted sex offender’s crimes, a view now held by 53% of the public.

MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS: A CRITICAL AND TIMELY COUNTERWEIGHT

This administration will be studied for decades, maybe centuries. Among its most notable lessons will be this: Bad communications make bad policy worse.

Montse Alvarado is about to show the world what it looks like when an institution finally decides to take messaging seriously. Someone at the White House should ask her for advice.