Between the Throne and the Mirror: the Pope who did not fear Trump in times of cognitive embolism

There are moments when silence is prudence; others when it is complicity...

By Glênio S Guedes ( brazilian attorney)

There are figures who are not explained by what they do, but by what they reveal. They are less protagonists than living contrasts—mirrors in which an age suddenly recognizes itself. Such is the case with the recent confrontation between Pope Leo XIV and Donald Trump.

On one side, power that needs to be heard. On the other, authority that knows when to speak.

For months, Leo XIV preserved the Church’s ancient prudence—a prudence born not of hesitation, but of memory. The Church, having seen empires rise and fall like passing seasons, tends to distrust the urgency of noise. Yet even prudence has its limits: the moment when language ceases to describe the world and begins to threaten it.

That moment arrived when war began to be spoken of as destiny, and destruction as strategy. Then the Pope spoke. And he did not speak to react, but to remind.

When he declared that God rejects the prayers of leaders whose hands are stained with blood, he did not name anyone; he pointed to something older and more persistent—the temptation to use the sacred as a justification for power.

I. A disease of the spirit

We may not understand this moment if we rely solely on political language. Another vocabulary is required—one more intimate.

The psychoanalyst Christian Dunker has spoken of what he calls a “narcissistic embolism”: a closing of the subject upon itself, an inability to recognize the other as limit, contradiction, or reality.

But our time has gone further.

Today we also suffer from what might be called a cognitive embolism—not a lack of information, but its excess; not the absence of truth, but its fragmentation into countless agreeable echoes. We are surrounded by discourses that do not challenge us, that return to us only what we already believe, as if thinking were merely repetition.

In such a world, power no longer needs to persuade. It merely needs to reflect.

Trump embodies this logic with unsettling clarity: a form of power that does not engage, does not listen, but projects itself as image. A power that must see itself in order to exist.

And so it multiplies mirrors.

II. Power as business

Some symptoms speak in numbers.

Never in recent American history has a president accumulated such wealth while in office. The boundary between governing and profiting—once a moral line—now appears increasingly blurred.

This is not merely enrichment. It is transformation.

Power ceases to be a form of service and becomes a platform; politics ceases to restrain interest and instead amplifies it. In this landscape, everything can be converted into capital—even authority itself.

And within such a system, narcissism finds its most perfect form: a structure that feeds it, celebrates it, and makes it profitable.

III. The “no” that protects

Against this expansion, Leo XIV’s figure acquires a different gravity.

Within the Christian tradition, there exists a forgotten gesture: the “no” as an act of care. Not a sterile refusal, but a boundary that protects, that preserves what might otherwise be lost.

When the Pope refuses to allow faith to be used as a justification for war, he is not intervening in politics in the ordinary sense; he is recalling something prior to politics—that power is not absolute.

His response, calm to the point of declaring that he is not afraid, is not defiance. It is freedom.

For only those who do not need to react are truly free.

While he is called weak, he reveals a strength that does not display itself. While he is provoked, he refuses the logic of provocation. While others perform, he sustains.

And in sustaining, he transforms.

IV. Between the grotesque and the sacred

The contrast, then, is not merely political or moral; it is also aesthetic.

On one side, spectacle: calculated images, symbolic performances, self-representations that verge on the grotesque—especially when power begins to dress itself in sacred imagery and, in doing so, empties it.

On the other, sobriety: the measured word, the restrained gesture, the refusal to turn the sacred into self-promotion.

It is the difference between noise and meaning.

V. The lucidity of resistance

At the level of world politics, this episode reveals something deeper.

There is a form of politics that turns reality into spectacle and language into an instrument of pressure. And there is another—quieter, but more enduring—that insists on speaking of peace, dialogue, and coexistence—words that, in our time, sound almost subversive.

This is not naïveté.

It is resistance.

When the Pope speaks of a world devastated by tyrants, he is not merely describing individuals; he is naming a logic—a way of understanding power as will without limit.

VI. Seeing what is evident

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of all is not the confrontation itself, but the time that makes it possible.

How did we arrive at a point where the obvious must be explained? Where spectacle replaces judgment? Where power can be confused with its own image?

In times of cognitive embolism, seeing becomes difficult.

And that is why lucidity has become a rare form of courage.

Leo XIV did not shout—and for that reason, he was heard.

He did not react—he responded.

He did not perform—he affirmed.

And in doing so, he revealed something that hardly needs to be said, yet insists on appearing: that a power which needs to appear divine may already have lost all contact with the human.