The Trump Administration Is Publicly Divided — and That's a Problem

The White House can't get its story straight on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum went on Fox Business Tuesday and dismissed the pope's AI warning outright. "I didn't know that tech editorializing was part of the role of being pope," Burgum said. Condescending. Dismissive. And politically dumb.

Vice President JD Vance — the highest-ranking Catholic in the Trump administration — told NBC the exact same message was "profound" and exactly the kind of "moral leadership" the Church should be offering.

These two men serve in the same administration. They gave opposite answers on the same day.

According to CNBC, Duke Divinity School theology professor Peter Casarella didn't mince words: "The vice president now seems to be backtracking on earlier criticisms when he said Pope Leo needs to learn more theology. They got ahead of their skis and are rowing back."

A White House that attacked the pope, realized Catholic voters are a core part of Trump's coalition, and is now walking it back in real time.

The Political Math Is Simple

Trump's second-term agenda is built on AI deregulation and dominance. Last week, according to CNBC, he delayed an executive order that would have created a voluntary AI safety review process — pulled back after tech industry pressure. His stated reason: oversight could slow America's edge against China.

Now the first American pope in history is calling for exactly the kind of guardrails Trump just killed.

Michael Toscano, director of the Family First Technology Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, told CNBC: "The so-called tech right, which is handcuffing the White House from doing something reasonable, I think will be revealed as mistaken."

This isn't a left-wing critique. It's coming from a Catholic family-values organization. That's the constituency cracking.

Big Tech Was Already in the Vatican — Months Before the Encyclical Dropped

Silicon Valley didn't react to the encyclical. They tried to shape it first.

According to Politico, on April 29 — nearly a month before the document's May 25 release — Father Eric Salobir led a delegation including representatives from Meta, Google, and Amazon through St. Peter's Square for a meeting with Vatican officials. The session at the French embassy to the Holy See lasted hours.

Politico interviewed seven people who confirmed this was part of a broader, quiet lobbying push by the tech industry ahead of the encyclical. Multiple meetings. Embassy events. Catholic intermediaries with deep Silicon Valley ties. All of it aimed at influencing how the Church would frame AI.

The same companies the encyclical implicitly criticizes for concentrating power were in Rome trying to manage the message before it published.

Did it work? The encyclical still called out Big Tech by name and demanded autonomous weapons controls. But the access was real.

Anthropic Gets the Vatican Stage — and It Wasn't an Accident

When Pope Leo XIV unveiled the encyclical on May 25, the guest speaker wasn't a cardinal or a philosopher. It was Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic.

According to Wired, this was the result of a deliberate, long-term effort stretching back years.

The Vatican's engagement with AI companies traces to 2020, when the Holy See co-signed the Rome Call for AI Ethics alongside Microsoft and IBM. But the relationship with Anthropic runs deeper.

Religion News Service reports that Brian Green, a tech ethics expert at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, has participated in multi-day conversations with Anthropic since January — including sessions with the programmers actually building the models. Other theologians and religious ethicists joined those sessions.

The Vatican chose Anthropic specifically because, unlike Google or Meta, Anthropic built its entire public identity around AI safety. Its "Constitutional AI" framework — training models using ethical principles rather than just patching dangerous outputs — aligned with what the Church wanted to hold up as a model.

Whether Anthropic deserves that halo is a separate debate. The company has raised billions in funding and is locked in a race with OpenAI and Google. "Safety-focused" and "not racing for market dominance" are NOT the same thing.

The Tolkien Shot Heard Round Silicon Valley

Wired flagged something the political press mostly missed: the encyclical quotes Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings.

That's a significant literary choice. Peter Thiel named his data analytics firm Palantir after the palantíri — the seeing-stones of Tolkien's mythology, associated with surveillance, the concentration of knowledge, and power susceptible to corruption. He reportedly calls his venture capital firm the Founders Fund "the precious" — Gollum's name for the One Ring, a device of totalitarian control.

Elon Musk has similarly drawn on Tolkien mythology.

The pope quoted Tolkien's Gandalf — the character who resists the ring's power — to make a point about what unchecked AI ambition actually looks like in Middle-earth. Tolkien wrote those books as a warning about the corrupting nature of power. Thiel apparently missed it.

What Actually Matters for Regular People

The Trump administration pulled back voluntary AI safety review after tech lobbyists pushed. The pope released a 42,300-word document saying that was the wrong call. The same tech companies criticized in that document were in Rome weeks earlier trying to soften the message.

And the White House's own vice president and interior secretary publicly contradicted each other on whether the pope had a point.

Regulatory capture is happening in real time — across governments and now across the Church. The question of who controls AI, and for whose benefit, isn't being settled in Congress or in the Vatican. It's being settled by whoever gets the most meetings.