'Anti-Christ' Barack Obama Claims New Pope Leo XIV 'Gets His Hands Dirty'

Barack Obama has spent the better part of two decades being cast as everything from socialist usurper to literal Antichrist. Conspiracy theories claiming the former US president was the 'Antichrist' of Christian eschatology erupted early in his rise and never really went away, pushed by political opponents, bloggers and conservative talk‑radio hosts after his 2008 victory.

A 2013 poll found 13% of American voters outright believed it, with another 13% unsure; among Mitt Romney supporters, the share hit 22%. The 'evidence' was a stew of misread scripture, false claims that his name appeared in the Quran (it doesn't), fury over Obamacare and LGBTQ+ rights, and the tired lie that he was a secret Muslim rather than the Protestant Christian he has always said he is.

Religious writers such as Left Behind authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins publicly dismissed the notion, and Obama's team even set up 'FightTheSmears.com' to bat this nonsense away, but the fantasy has proved stubborn – resurfacing, inevitably, in AI‑generated conspiracy content as recently as 2023.

Against that background, it is faintly surreal to watch Obama, calm and almost mischievous, talk on a podcast about the one person he still really wants to meet: a pope. Specifically, the new one from his own city.

On a recent episode of Bryan Tyler Cohen's No Lie podcast, the 44th president was asked whether anyone remained on his 'most wanted' list of encounters. This is a man who has sat with Angela Merkel, traded jokes with David Cameron, sparred with Vladimir Putin and been blessed by the late queen. Some diplomatic hedging might have been expected. Instead, he went straight for it.

'I'll be honest with you, being president or even being an ex-president, I can kind of meet everybody. So I've met a lot of folks,' Obama answered. Obama shared that he's hoping to meet the pope, who is also a Chicago native, 'sometime in the future.'

Then he made it explicit: 'The person who I have not yet met that I'm looking forward to meeting, and I hope I get an opportunity sometime in the future as the new pope who is from Chicago and a White Sox fan.'

Obama on Pope Leo XIV: 'Cut From That Cloth'

The pope in question is Leo XIV, born Robert F. Prevost on Chicago's South Side and elected in May 2025 as the first American to lead the Catholic Church in two millennia. An Augustinian friar, he spent years in Peru as a missionary and later as bishop of Chiclayo before Pope Francis summoned him to Rome in 2023 to run the Dicastery for Bishops, the powerful office that vets episcopal appointments around the world. Only then did the cardinals elevate him to the papacy. For Obama, that backstory is the point. He framed his answer by talking about the religious leaders he has already known.

'I had the pleasure of getting to know Pope Francis pretty well, and he was legit,' said the former president. 'There's some figures he's won. The Dalai Lama was another, who they're how you hope they are.'

What he means, stripped of the American vernacular, is that some leaders are exactly what you would like them to be when the cameras switch off.

'They kind of walk the walk. And my sense of this new pope is he's from that, he's cut from that cloth,' Obama added. 'Somebody who worked in places that really needed help and wasn't just preaching from a pulpit, but getting his hands dirty, trying to help people. So I'm looking forward to talking to him.'

It is more than hometown pride in a fellow South Sider and declared White Sox fan. Coming from a man who has had his own faith dissected, lied about and turned into a weapon, it is a fairly deliberate act of vouching. Obama is effectively telling listeners: this pope's authority was earned in dusty parishes in northern Peru, not manufactured on social media.

For once, the 'local boy done good' narrative is doing something more than flag‑waving. Obama is effectively arguing that Leo's authority including the authority to lecture a tech‑saturated world about intimacy was earned in dusty, forgotten corners of the map, not conjured by white smoke.

A First American Pope, an Awkward Label

Leo XIV's election shredded a long‑standing Vatican taboo. For decades, the idea of an American pope was deliberately avoided, on the logic that Washington already wields enough secular clout; handing the papacy to a US citizen looked like geopolitical overkill.

Prevost's life story complicated that calculus. Yes, he is American‑born, but he is also a Peruvian citizen who lived much of his adult life in Latin America. That mix made it easier, just about, for cardinals to convince themselves they were not simply putting a US flag over the Apostolic Palace.

American commentators, predictably, did not bother with such nuance. The 'American pope' headlines wrote themselves; cable news tickers quickly boiled Leo down to a few key traits:

Chicago, White Sox, friendly with migrants, wary of culture‑war theatrics. Obama's podcast answer leans shamelessly into the Chicago angle that's how he operates, turning vast abstractions into neighbourhood stories but then swerves to something rarer in modern politics: respect grounded in work done far from the spotlight.

The contrast with the fever‑dream version of Obama that still haunts parts of the American right is hard to miss. While corners of the internet continue to recycle Antichrist memes and birther garbage, the man at the centre of it is on a podcast talking earnestly about integrity, about leaders who 'walk the walk,' and about wanting to sit down with a pope whom, he believes, has actually earned his robes.

Leaders He Trusted, and the Ones He Doesn't Name

Cohen's question was not just about religious figures. He also pushed Obama to name the world leaders he most enjoyed dealing with while in office.

Obama reached first for Angela Merkel. The former German chancellor, he said, 'became very close' to him during his presidency, in part because 'she really was the leader of Europe' at the time and the pair were forced to navigate a mess of crises together. He calls her 'wicked smart' and, crucially, someone with 'integrity.'

'She came from a center-right tradition. I obviously come from a left-center, left position, but she had integrity, very wicked smart, and we're both analytical and practical and try to figure out how to problem solve,' he said. It is, unintentionally, a manifesto for the kind of politics that now looks almost antique: grounded, boring, focused on work rather than performance.

Asked whom he liked least, he refuses to give the clip the internet is begging for. 'I'm going to defer on the leaders I liked least,' he said dryly. 'There's enough of a public record. People probably have a sense of some of the folks who I wasn't happy with.'

In that light, his enthusiasm for Leo XIV looks even more pointed. The former president who has learned, painfully, how distorted public images can become is placing an early bet on the new pope's character sight unseen, but biography read.

Pope Leo, for his part, has already shown a flair for bluntness that will not make his life easier. He has warned, for instance, that AI 'lovers' and sex robots threaten to 'invade and occupy' human intimacy, language that instantly dropped him into the culture‑war meat grinder. Yet it is exactly the sort of awkward, unfashionable concern you might expect from a priest who has spent years in communities where loneliness, exploitation and cheap promises are not tech talking points but daily realities.

Whether Obama gets his hoped‑for audience 'sometime in the future' is almost beside the point. The fact that a man once painted as the biblical embodiment of evil is publicly praising a new, American‑born pope as 'cut from that cloth' of leaders who get their hands dirty is a small but telling twist in a much larger story.

In a public square saturated with grandstanding and bad faith, there is something almost jarring about hearing one global figure say of another: I think this one might actually be the real deal — and I'd like to meet him, not to trade photo ops, but to talk.