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Donald Trump vs. Pope Francis heats up with #MakeTheVaticanGreatAgain

Let's settle this the old-fashioned way: on Twitter.

 

Elijah Watson

Internet Culture

Posted on Feb 19, 2016   Updated on May 27, 2021, 4:48 am CDT

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has a new enemy (what’s new, right?) in Pope Francis. The head of the Catholic church called out Mr. “Make America Great Again” over his plans to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border, with Trump calling the Pope “disgraceful” in response.

And while Trump’s comments on Il Papa were characteristically acid, the war of words ultimately led to the beautiful (and hilarious) creation of #MakeTheVaticanGreatAgain, a hashtag that allowed Twitter users to imagine attacks Trump may launch against the Pope in the near future.

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https://twitter.com/RichardKimNYC/status/700367736044679169

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https://twitter.com/JasperAvi/status/700379626271567872

If you were to quiz someone on whether Trump actually tweeted any of that, chances are they’d flunk, because each one totally sounds like something he’d say. In that same statement where he called the pontiff “disgraceful,” the presidential hopeful also said the following:

“If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians.”

Until Pope Francis responds (which would be a first for his Twitter account), at least we have this running joke.

H/T Mashable | Photo via Benson Kua/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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*First Published: Feb 19, 2016, 6:26 pm CST