Papal Shade: Francis Gifts Trump a Climate Change Encyclical
President Donald Trump met with Pope Francis Wednesday morning, and the pontiff made sure to give the president a gift weighted with certain connotations: an encyclical urging action in response to climate change.
Meeting at the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, the climate-skeptic president had his first ever encounter with perhaps the most woke Pope ever. The two have something of a contentious history, including a public spat over Trump’s plan to build a wall on the Southern border of the US: Francis called those who build barriers “not Christian,” and Trump called his comments “disgraceful.”
But there’s been another point of dispute: Trump has often pledged to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and called global warming a hoax created by the Chinese.
According to Reuters, Francis urged Trump to be a “peacemaker” at their meeting, and gifted Trump a copy of his lengthly 2015 encyclical on the need to protect the planet against the threat of climate change. — we’ll sure he’ll read it on the plane.
“Thank you, thank you. I won’t forget what you said,” Trump told Francis as he left the meeting.
The gift is yet another example of foreign dignitaries using not-so-subtle hints to try and influence an impressionable Trump administration — in March, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took Ivanka Trump to a Broadway musical about the importance of welcoming foreigners, in the wake of the president’s attempts to implement a travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries.
[image via screengrab]
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