Host Jeffrey Goldberg and the “Washington Week” panel discuss the politics of Pope Leo XIV and the MAGA movement. Goldberg’s opening monologue:

JEFFREY GOLDBERG, THE ATLANTIC, ‘WASHINGTON WEEK’ HOST: President Trump’s leadership on the world stage is being put to the test everywhere, and the challenge for America’s allies and adversaries alike is this, figuring out his actual policies. As the president prepares for the first major foreign trip of his second term, we assess America’s erratic and contradictory role in conflict zones across the globe, next. Good evening and welcome to Washington Week. Let me try to encapsulate the challenge before us tonight. Here in Washington, no one knows for sure what President Trump wants to do about the Iranian nuclear program. No one in Jerusalem knows if the president has truly just left Israel to fight the Houthis of Yemen alone. In Ottawa, no one really understands why Trump keeps threatening Canada’s sovereignty. In Copenhagen, leaders are asking themselves if Trump would actually invade Greenland. And at the Vatican, one likely subject, how will the new American pope get along with an American president not known for sharing the stage or the pope’s views on poverty and immigration? I’ll try to unpack these mysteries tonight with my guests, Susan Glasser, staff writer at the New Yorker, Asma Khalid is an NPR White House correspondent and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, David Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent at The New York Times, and Nancy Youssef is a national security correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. Okay, we have to go fast because there’s a lot of countries to talk about. The first, let’s talk about the biggest news of the week. And I recognize that the election of a new pope is a matter of supreme ecclesiastical import, but this is Washington Week, so we’re just going to do the politics of it. I’m very sorry about that. So, Pope Leo XIV is among other things an American on the world stage with far more followers than the entire MAGA movement combined. And so one of the questions I have is how is this relationship going to work? I mean, the president was very kind about the new pope. He said it’s such a great honor for our country to have an American pope. I mean, what greater honor could there be? And we were a little bit surprised and very happy. It’s just a great, absolutely great honor. It’s sort of like America won Eurovision or something, but it’s — you know, he was very generous about that. But I also want to take note of an article that the pope, then-cardinal, recently posted. The headline that he posted was, J.D. Vance is wrong, Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others. So, let me start. David, let me start with you. Try to look out a little bit into the future. What do you think this relationship between the two most important Americans in the world is going to look like?

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