Wall Street Journal national security reporter Alex Ward says First Lady Melania Trump essentially stole credit for Pope Leo XIV’s hard work to broker a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.
Hundreds of people from an occupied city of Oleshky, in southern Ukraine, were evacuated on Friday under a ceasefire agreement allegedly negotiated by Melania Trump, according to the White House. But Ward told “Today, Explained” co-host Sean Rameswaram that it was really the Pope who built the bones of the agreement.
“It’s possible she had a role. I’m going to personally, without too much reporting, say that it was probably more Pope Leo,” said Ward.
“Melania stole Pope Leo’s ceasefire?” asked Rameswaram.
“I think a little bit. … The Russians are very much saying, ‘look at Melania Trump, look at how important she was to all this.’ And if I’m the Russians, I would love to be saying things like that because then President Trump feels like the Russians are being very generous towards my wife and to my family, and therefore I side with them.”
“It feels very convenient that the Russians are pumping that up and that even the White House is pumping up Melania Trump’s influence,” said Ward, while adding that he did not want to fully discredit her. “I’m sure she did work on this.”
Ward added that while it’s “totally possible” that the First Lady is the driving force behind the ceasefire, he said “there’s just a lot of skepticism out there about whether Kyiv and Moscow were brought to the table and browbeaten by the First Lady.”
“Again, very possible, but both sides, being Ukraine and Russia, have an incentive to play up her role,” said Ward.
Meanwhile, Trump’s catholic approval has collapsed to 30 percent before the midterms, as Trump continues to square off against Leo and impose the White House’s will over the Hole See.
“Donald Trump won the Catholic vote in 2024 by twelve points, 55 percent to Kamala Harris’s 43 percent, reports Catholic Church correspondent Christopher Hale. And four years earlier, the same group had split almost evenly.
However, six days before the midterms, Pew now finds that only 30 percent of American Catholics approve of the job Trump is doing.
“For most of his first year back in office, the decline came gradually. Trump’s approval among Catholics fell to 42 percent by April 2025 and bounced around the low 40s through the summer and fall; by January 2026 it sat at 39 percent,” wrote Hale. “ … Since then, Trump’s Catholic approval has fallen another nine points, from 39 percent to 30. With white Catholics the slide runs steeper: 13 points, from 52 percent to 39, nearly double what he lost with them over his entire first year.”
Pew does not explain the collapse, but Hale said the slide has everything to do with another Trump-era war: his voluntary attack on Iran.