President Biden had just arrived back at the White House following a weekend at Camp David with his family, walking through the doors from the South Lawn shortly after 7 p.m. He had 45 minutes before he was to deliver remarks about the Supreme Court’s decision to grant immunity to Donald Trump for official acts he took as president.
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Biden family grapples with pressure on their patriarch to step aside
The president motioned to his son Hunter, who was standing nearby, asking him to listen and join the fine-tuning of the remarks that would be loaded into the teleprompter and delivered to a nation that had grown deeply skeptical of the president’s mental acuity in the aftermath of a stumbling, meandering debate performance four nights prior.
Hunter’s presence that evening raised eyebrows among some White House staffers, who saw it as a troubling sign that a politically problematic family member was taking a renewed part in official business. But for those in and close to the family, it was the latest sign that Hunter had stabilized his life and was assuming a role he’d long held inside his father’s orbit as a confidant and sounding board.
As remarkable as the past few weeks have been in the wider political universe, they have been equally turbulent inside the tight-knit Biden family, unfolding as the latest chapter in the clan’s long story of resolve amid tumult. Family members have flashed through a range of emotions, people close to them say — sadness, anger, determination — and are deeply frustrated by what they see as the betrayal and second-guessing of a man who has spent a half-century as a dedicated leader of the Democratic Party.
This picture of the Biden family in its patriarch’s hour of peril is based on interviews with multiple people with direct knowledge of the family’s thinking and private actions. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters related to the president’s inner circle.
Family members have often been with Biden in recent weeks as he seeks to ride out the political storm stemming from his debate performance. First lady Jill Biden joined him for a campaign swing in Pennsylvania. After he was diagnosed with covid-19 on Wednesday and with calls escalating by the day that he reconsider his decision to stay in the race, she joined him at their home in Rehoboth Beach, Del.
Hunter, who lives in California, flew out to meet Biden when the president was in Las Vegas recently for campaign events. They have remained in close contact, with Hunter following daily, often hourly, developments, on calls with his father and acting as a sounding board and a gut check. Other family members have been exchanging their usual daily phone calls and frequent text messages.
But in a family where any member can call an emergency meeting, no one has summoned the clan to discuss the patriarch’s political future, despite the extensive speculation from outsiders about some grand family council.
The family’s anger is driven in part by a conviction that Biden could have moved beyond a bad performance in a 90-minute debate if so many Democrats had not immediately joined forces against him. They have come to view the past few weeks as a Game of Thrones-style war among various factions of the party, with the loudest calling on him to depart coming from those he has fought against in previous battles. The tone some in the party are taking in their effort to push him out has only stiffened Biden’s resolve to stay in, they say.
“It’s like they don’t know he’s Irish,” said one person close to the family.
The most striking development in this private world may be the return of Hunter Biden to a central, supporting role, just weeks after his criminal trial made him a source of personal worry and political peril.
When he was convicted on June 11 of felony charges related to lying on a gun-purchase form, the family rallied behind him. His father called to make sure he was okay, then flew to Wilmington to embrace him on an airport tarmac.
But overnight, the father-son roles have been reversed: As Joe Biden fights for his political life, Hunter has talked with his father frequently, providing support amid a clamor of skeptical Democrats.
Interviews with several people close to family members say that, contrary to frequent depictions of Hunter and Jill Biden as irrational cheerleaders prevailing on the president to stay in while his political advisers press him to reconsider, the family dynamics are far more nuanced. The president throughout has been clear that he is not withdrawing, and they have affirmed all along that they are behind him no matter what. Biden may yet change his mind, and those close to the family say they would support that decision, too.
When it comes to Hunter Biden, the past few weeks have shown how a father and a son, each well-versed in tragedy and trauma, have handled a series of extraordinary difficult moments, their own and each other’s.
“The thing both of them care about more than anything else is not harming the other,” said one person close to the family. “It all has a Shakespearean quality to it.”
Surviving a legal blow
On June 11, at around 11:15 a.m., a federal jury in Delaware found Hunter Biden guilty of felony gun charges. His crime was lying on a form when he bought a gun in 2018, but the week-long trial laid bare, in sometimes painful detail, his humiliating and distasteful behavior when he was in the throes of a drug addiction.
Hunter hugged each member of his legal team after the verdict, thanking them and comforting his top defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, and whispering, “It’s all right.”
He then gathered with his friends and family in a crowded room nearby for what several who were there describe as an emotional scene where Hunter was stoic even as many were in tears after a devastating verdict that shocked some in his camp.
“Look guys, I’m going to be okay. This isn’t hell,” Hunter said, according to people who were there. “My addiction was hell. Whatever happens, I’m standing here today, and that’s what matters.”
The president, who was in Washington, called his son and hastily made plans to fly to Wilmington to see Hunter. They met on the tarmac at Delaware Air National Guard base, embracing each other before Hunter flew back to his home in Los Angeles with his wife and young son, Beau.
That evening, the president and first lady personally called some of those who had attended the trial to thank them and to ask how they thought Hunter was doing.
The answers that came back were that he seemed surprisingly strong. It was an unquestionably significant legal setback, one that could result in a prison sentence, but he seemed to have achieved some sense of personal stability.
Joe Biden soon left for the Group of Seven conference in Italy, joined by several of Hunter’s older daughters, including Naomi, who had testified at the trial.
The weekend at Camp David
About two weeks later, as the president’s fateful debate performance played out in Atlanta, Hunter was home in California. Jill Biden was with her husband. Biden’s grandchildren were scattered around the country.
Afterward, they knew the debate had not gone well and worried about the impression it left. But it did not alter their approach to the campaign.
Many outside the family thought Biden faced an immediate decision about whether to stay in the race, but that seems never to have been a question for the president himself. He saw the debate simply as a setback in an otherwise sound campaign, a hurdle in a life full of them. That attitude was adopted by the family largely without discussion.
“There is no walking into this as if he’s like, ‘Should I get out, should I not get out?’ That’s just not who Joe Biden is,” said one person close to the family. “It’s not like he was teetering until he talked to Hunter and Jill.”
By late Saturday night, some 48 hours after the debate, the whole family was at Camp David — not for some emergency council, but for a prearranged gathering in the days before Independence Day. Just weeks earlier, the question was how Hunter was faring against his detractors; now it was how Joe would face his.
The tone of that weekend, in private moments without political advisers, set the course for the tumultuous weeks to come: Biden was staying in and the family was backing him. The question was how to proceed with the race, not whether to.
Many in the family, like their patriarch, believe the election remains close. They dismiss polls that show otherwise and do not believe an alternative candidate would fare any better against Trump. Deep in Biden’s psyche is the conviction that he is an underdog who has consistently been underestimated by party leaders, only to prove them wrong.
But family members resist the idea that they are the ones driving the decision. They resent any notion that they are propping up the president. He is capable of making these weighty decisions as he always has, they say, with their input and backing.
There is also a redemptive quality to the family discussions.
Five years ago, when Biden decided to run for president, the family was deeply fractured in the aftermath of his son Beau’s death, dealing with divorce, affairs and addiction. Hunter was in some ways more distant from his father than he’d ever been.
This post-debate gathering at Camp David showcased a family that was largely united, with Hunter as present in his father’s life as he was before a drug addiction tore him away.
Clear-eyed about the danger
When they returned to the White House after the weekend at Camp David, the family stayed close. They celebrated the Fourth of July together. Ashley Biden was dancing on the portico, hugging her father’s waist from behind. One granddaughter, Maisy, wore a white T-shirt with “I [heart] Joe” written on it.
Jill stood by his side. They looked on as fireworks burst in the sky.
Hunter flew back to Los Angeles on July 5 and his father flew to Wisconsin for a campaign event. They have remained in close contact.
Biden remains certain he is the party’s best option, according to those close to the family, and they support him in that. But they also recognize that things can change quickly in politics and that Biden could be 100 percent in until he’s 100 percent out.
“Hunter would support anything his dad wanted to do and he trusts his dad’s judgment,” one person close to the family said. “If his dad said, ‘I can hand this off and I can’t do it,’ Hunter would say, ‘Dad you’re the best, I love you, I trust you and I support you.’”
Of anyone in the family, Hunter has faced the most scrutiny as a result of his father’s presidency. That arguably gives him an incentive to hope his father pulls out rather than endure a vitriolic reelection race potentially followed by four more years of an unwelcome spotlight.
But if Biden pulled out and Trump were to win, some family members worry that he would use the Justice Department to target Hunter.
In recent days, those close to the family have become more combative as a growing number of Democrats have publicly called for him to step aside. If Biden gets out, they say, he should make the decision based on his own political gut and not because of external pressures from figures such as George Clooney, former president Barack Obama or former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Still, those in the family orbit say Biden’s relatives are not oblivious to the storms roaring around him, making the days ahead, even for them, difficult to predict.
“They are not in a bubble. They don’t have their head in the sand,” one person close to the family said. “They’ve been very clear-eyed about this from the beginning. And that has continued.”
When President Barack Obama negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran more than a decade ago, his point man was Secretary of State John Kerry. Over 20 months of talks, Mr. Kerry met with his Iranian counterpart on at least 18 different days, often several times per day.
High-level nuclear diplomacy was a natural role for the top U.S. diplomat. Secretaries of state traditionally take the lead on the country’s biggest diplomatic tasks, from arms control treaties to Israeli-Palestinian agreements.
But as President Trump prepares to send a delegation to the latest round of U.S.-Iran talks in Pakistan this weekend, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, will remain where he often does: at home.
Mr. Rubio did not attend the last U.S. meeting with Iran earlier this month. Nor did he join several meetings held over the past year in Geneva and Doha. Mr. Rubio has also been absent from U.S. delegations abroad working to settle the war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza. Despite a long period of crisis and war in the region, he has not visited the Middle East since a brief stop in Israel last October.
In recent months, Mr. Rubio — consumed with his second role, as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser — has not traveled much at all.
During the Biden administration, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken made 11 foreign trips from January 2024 to late April 2024, stopping in roughly three dozen cities, according to the State Department. So far this year, Mr. Rubio has visited six foreign cities, including a stop in Milan for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Mr. Trump has outsourced much of his diplomacy to others, including his friend Steve Witkoff, a wealthy associate from the world of Manhattan real estate, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner have spearheaded diplomacy with Israel, Ukraine and Russia, as well as Iran, whose delegation they will meet for the second time this month in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.
Mr. Rubio’s distance from the trenches of diplomacy reflects his dual role on Mr. Trump’s national security team. For the past year, he has served as the White House national security adviser even while leading the State Department — the first person to do so since Henry A. Kissinger in the mid-1970s.
The secretary of state runs the State Department, overseeing U.S. diplomats and embassies worldwide, as well as Washington-based policymakers. Working from the White House, the national security adviser coordinates departments and agencies, including the State Department, to develop policy advice for the president.
The twin roles reflect Mr. Rubio’s influence with Mr. Trump, and offer him a way to maintain it. For Mr. Rubio, less time abroad means more time at the side of an impulsive president prone to making critical national security decisions at any moment.
As Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Kushner and Vice President JD Vance met with Iranian officials in Pakistan earlier this month, Mr. Rubio was at Mr. Trump’s side at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, noted Emma Ashford, an analyst of U.S. diplomacy at the nonpartisan Stimson Center in Washington. “Rubio clearly prefers to stay close to Trump,” Ms. Ashford said.
Mr. Rubio accepted the national security adviser job on an acting basis last May after Mr. Trump reassigned the job’s previous occupant, Michael Waltz. But officials say that Mr. Rubio is expected to keep it indefinitely.
That arrangement is not inherently bad, Ms. Ashford added. And she noted that previous presidents had entrusted major diplomatic tasks to people other than the secretary of state. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. delegated his C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, to handle diplomacy with Russia and cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, for instance.
But she echoed the complaints by many current and former diplomats that Mr. Rubio seems less like someone performing both jobs than a national security adviser who sometimes shows up at the State Department. “I do think it’s to the detriment of the whole department of State and to America’s ability to conduct diplomacy in general that we effectively have the secretary of state position sitting vacant,” she said.
Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, contested such claims. “Anyone trying to paint Secretary Rubio’s close coordination with the White House and other agencies as a negative could not be more wrong,” he said. “We now have an N.S.C. and State Department that are totally in sync, a goal that has eluded past administrations for decades.”
Mr. Rubio divides his time between the State Department and the White House, often spending time at both in the same day. In an interview with Politico last June, Mr. Rubio said he visited the State Department “almost every day.”
While there, he often meets with visiting dignitaries before returning to the White House. Last week, Mr. Rubio presided over a meeting at the State Department between Lebanese and Israeli officials that set the stage for a cease-fire in Lebanon.
His twin jobs “really do overlap in many cases,” he said. “In many cases you end up being in the same meetings or in the same places; there’s just one less person in there, if you think about it,” Mr. Rubio added. “A lot of people would come to Washington, for example, for meetings, and they’d want to meet with the national security adviser and then meet with me as secretary of state. Now they can do both in one meeting.”
Asked about his travel schedule during a news conference last December, Mr. Rubio said he had less reason to travel abroad because “we have a lot of leaders constantly coming here” to visit Mr. Trump at the White House. Mr. Rubio also joins Mr. Trump’s foreign trips in his capacity as national security adviser.
Many national security veterans call the arrangement unwise, saying that both jobs are extremely demanding and incompatible with one another.
It was not easy even for Mr. Kissinger, who had firmly established himself over more than four years as national security adviser before convincing President Richard M. Nixon to let him take on an additional role as secretary of state in 1973. (In a reversal of Mr. Rubio’s approach, Mr. Kissinger was in constant motion, including a round of Middle East shuttle diplomacy that kept him on the road for 33 straight days.)
“In general, it’s a mistake to combine those roles,” said Matthew Waxman, who held senior roles at the National Security Council, State Department and the Pentagon during the George W. Bush administration.
“That said, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that a dual-hatted Rubio is so offscreen right now,” Mr. Waxman added. “Especially while so much attention is focused on high-wire diplomacy with Iran, someone needs to manage foreign policy around the rest of the world.”
President Trump speaks during an event on health care affordability in the Oval Office at the White House on Thursday in Washington.
Mark Schiefelbein/AP
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Mark Schiefelbein/AP
WASHINGTON — An appeals court on Friday blocked President Trump’s executive order suspending asylum access at the southern border of the U.S., a key pillar of the Republican president’s plan to crack down on migration.
A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that immigration laws give people the right to apply for asylum at the border, and the president can’t circumvent that.
The court opinion stems from action taken by Trump on Inauguration Day 2025, when he declared that the situation at the southern border constituted an invasion of America and that he was “suspending the physical entry” of migrants and their ability to seek asylum until he decides it is over.
The panel concluded that the Immigration and Nationality Act doesn’t authorize the president to remove the plaintiffs under “procedures of his own making,” allow him to suspend plaintiffs’ right to apply for asylum or curtail procedures for adjudicating their anti-torture claims.
“The power by proclamation to temporarily suspend the entry of specified foreign individuals into the United States does not contain implicit authority to override the INA’s mandatory process to summarily remove foreign individuals,” wrote Judge J. Michelle Childs, who was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Joe Biden.
“We conclude that the INA’s text, structure, and history make clear that in supplying power to suspend entry by Presidential proclamation, Congress did not intend to grant the Executive the expansive removal authority it asserts,” the opinion said.
White House says asylum ban was within Trump’s powers
The administration can ask the full appeals court to reconsider the ruling or go to the Supreme Court.
The order doesn’t formally take effect until after the court considers any request to reconsider.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking on Fox News, said she had not seen the ruling but called it “unsurprising,” blaming politically-motivated judges.
“They are not acting as true litigators of the law. They are looking at these cases from a political lens,” she said.
Leavitt said Trump was taking actions that are “completely within his powers as commander in chief.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the Department of Justice would seek further review of the decision. “We are sure we will be vindicated,” she wrote in an emailed statement.
The Department of Homeland Security said it strongly disagreed with the ruling.
“President Trump’s top priority remains the screening and vetting of all aliens seeking to come, live, or work in the United States,” DHS said in a statement.
Advocates welcome the ruling
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that previous legal action had already paused the asylum ban, and the ruling won’t change much on the ground.
The ruling, however, represents another legal defeat for a centerpiece policy of the president.
“This confirms that President Trump cannot on his own bar people from seeking asylum, that it is Congress that has mandated that asylum seekers have a right to apply for asylum and the President cannot simply invoke his authority to sustain,” said Reichlin-Melnick.
Advocates say the right to request asylum is enshrined in the country’s immigration law and say denying migrants that right puts people fleeing war or persecution in grave danger.
Lee Gelernt, attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, who argued the case, said in a statement that the appellate ruling is “essential for those fleeing danger who have been denied even a hearing to present asylum claims under the Trump administration’s unlawful and inhumane executive order.”
Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, welcomed the court decision as a victory for their clients.
“Today’s DC Circuit ruling affirms that capricious actions by the President cannot supplant the rule of law in the United States,” said Nicolas Palazzo, director of advocacy and legal Services at Las Americas.
Judge Justin Walker, a Trump nominee, wrote a partial dissent. He said the law gives immigrants protections against removal to countries where they would be persecuted, but the administration can issue broad denials of asylum applications.
Walker, however, agreed with the majority that the president cannot deport migrants to countries where they will be persecuted or strip them of mandatory procedures that protect against their removal.
Judge Cornelia Pillard, who was nominated by Democratic President Obama, also heard the case.
In the executive order, Trump argued that the Immigration and Nationality Act gives presidents the authority to suspend entry of any group that they find “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
The executive order also suspended the ability of migrants to ask for asylum.
Trump’s order was another blow to asylum access in the U.S., which was severely curtailed under the Biden administration, although under Biden some pathways for protections for a limited number of asylum seekers at the southern border continued.
Migrant advocate in Mexico expresses cautious hope
For Josue Martinez, a psychologist who works at a small migrant shelter in southern Mexico, the ruling marked a potential “light at the end of the tunnel” for many migrants who once hoped to seek asylum in the U.S. but ended up stuck in vulnerable conditions in Mexico.
“I hope there’s something more concrete, because we’ve heard this kind of news before: A district judge files an appeal, there’s a temporary hold, but it’s only temporary and then it’s over,” he said.
Meanwhile, migrants from Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela and other countries have struggled to make ends meet as they try to seek refuge in Mexico’s asylum system that’s all but collapsed under the weight of new strains and slashed international funds.
This week hundreds of migrants, mostly stranded migrants from Haiti, left the southern Mexican city of Tapachula on foot to seek better living conditions elsewhere in Mexico.
When Stuart Sepulvida arrives at St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Parish in Tucson, Ariz., for Mass, which he attends most mornings, he passes a display honoring local soldiers and encouraging parishioners to pray for their safety. Hundreds of small cards record their names: Robles, Arenas, Grajeda. A portrait of Pope Leo XIV hangs across the lobby.
Mr. Sepulvida, 81, is a Vietnam veteran whose patriotism and Catholicism are deeply intertwined. He voted for President Trump three times but has never felt more betrayed by an American president than when Mr. Trump denounced Pope Leo as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”
“It was very disturbing to me to hear both of them clashing like they did,” Mr. Sepulvida said, standing outside the church one morning this week. Now, he is reconsidering whether he will vote Republican this year.
The Republican Party is struggling to hold onto the support from Hispanic voters who helped propel Mr. Trump back into the White House in 2024. Yet as many party leaders have acknowledged the urgent need to stop the backsliding among Latinos, the president has enraged many of even his strongest supporters by clashing with the pope.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo, the first U.S.-born pontiff, spoke of the need to “abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars.” Within days, Mr. Trump, who has led the United States into a war with Iran, said the pope was “catering to the radical left” and posted an AI-generated image portraying himself as a Jesus figure. Mr. Trump later deleted the image, saying he thought it depicted him as a doctor.
“It just isn’t what a president should do,” Mr. Sepulvida said. “The pope speaks for his people. He is beyond politics.”
Mr. Trump won 55 percent of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, compared to 43 percent who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Pew Research Center. The most sizable gains came from Hispanic Catholics. While Joseph R. Biden Jr. won their votes by a 35-point margin in 2020, the Democratic advantage shrunk to 17 points in 2024. Now, just 18 percent of Hispanic Catholics said they support most or all of President Trump’s agenda, according to a poll from Pew released earlier this year.
If the president’s quarrel with the pope sours more Latinos on the Republican Party, it could affect midterm races across the country, including in South Florida and South Texas, where Republicans have notched important victories in predominantly Hispanic districts in recent years.
In Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, which stretches from north of Tucson to the Mexican border, voters were still grappling with the fallout this week.
The district is roughly evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats and independent voters. Nearly a third of the district is Hispanic, and there is a significant population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as a large Catholic community with deep history in the region. It also has one of largest numbers of military veterans of all congressional districts in the country.
“The president is looking for a lot of attention from everything,” said Maria Ramos, 60, who regularly attends weekday Mass at St. Francis. A registered independent, she usually votes for Democrats but often declines to cast a ballot if she views a candidate as too liberal. “He believes he can put God in his place. He’s meddling in countries that he’s not in control of — he wants to control the world.”
“It is not just a very serious lack of respect — it is a mortal sin,” she said, shaking her head. One word comes to her mind again and again, she said: disgust.
Like so many others in southern Arizona, Ms. Ramos has several relatives who serve in the military — a path they saw to both serve the country and as an entry into the stable middle class. Many of them, she said, voted for Mr. Trump for president.
The Tucson district is now widely seen as one of the most competitive in the country. Republican Juan Ciscomani narrowly won the district in 2022, in part by emphasizing his biography as a Mexican immigrant and a devoted father of six children. He is also an evangelical Christian, a group that has driven much of the growth among Hispanic Republican voters in recent years.
Mr. Ciscomani declined a request for an interview, but when a local radio host asked Mr. Ciscomani what he thought of Mr. Trump’s comments “as a man of faith,” the congressman declined to criticize the president but said, “You can trust that you won’t see any meme like that coming out of my account.”
JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat challenging Mr. Ciscomani this fall, has made her 20-year career in the U.S. Navy and Marines a key aspect of her story on the campaign trail. While she rarely speaks about her religious background and no longer considers herself a practicing Catholic, she said she briefly considered becoming a nun as a teenager. She criticized Mr. Ciscomani for not condemning the president’s remarks.
“You can’t make faith a central part of your campaign and then allow this to stand,” she said in an interview.
Across Tucson, Latino Catholics, regardless of their past voting preferences, were similarly quick to condemn the president’s remarks.
When Cecilia Taisipic, 71, heard about it, she said, she winced with shame about her vote for him in 2024.
“I thought he would make the country better, but apparently it’s the opposite,” she said as she left Mass at St. Francis earlier this week. She is so fed up with politics, she said, that she is unlikely to vote at all this year. “When it comes to my faith, I don’t like anybody to challenge it. Now I don’t want to hear anything on the news. I just want to pray.”
Matilde Robinson Bours, 63, teaches a weekly Spanish Bible study class at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish, and like nearly all of the women in her class, she immigrated from Mexico decades ago. She has voted for Republicans in nearly every election since she became a citizen. Though she has never liked President Trump, she said, his comments about the pope enraged her more than anything else he has said or done in the past.
“This surpassed everything, every social and political norm — this is personal to all Catholics,” she said. “The arrogance and ego is disgusting. To think that he is God? The pope has every right and responsibility to talk about peace.”
Still, Ms. Robinson Bours said, nothing will stop her from supporting Republicans again this year. She has been delighted that her adult children have stopped supporting Democrats in recent elections.
“Almost everyone I know thinks the way I do,” she said.
Patricia Martinez, 86, who has attended the same Bible study as Ms. Robinson Bours for years, shook her head in disagreement. She said she cannot imagine voting for a Republican who supports Mr. Trump.
“This is different — this shows he is out of his mind,” said Ms. Martinez. “We have to have basic respect and teach that to people in this country.”
Patrick Robles, a 24-year-old native of Tucson, spent years alienated from the Roman Catholic Church, but returned to his faith more recently. “The craziness of the world sort of caused me to seek some sort of answers,” he said. Now, he attends Mass at the St. Augustine Cathedral in downtown Tucson, a few blocks from the office where he works as an aide to Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.
Mr. Robles said he saw Mr. Trump’s battle with the pope as both a personal affront and a political opportunity.
“The president is basically trying to draw a line between Catholics and what we perceive to be patriotism,” he said. “I believe we can be both.”
Last week, he texted one of his uncles who has supported Mr. Trump in every election asking him what he thought.
“I’m afraid we need divine intervention,” the uncle replied.
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