A day after releasing a biting comment that slammed Pope Francis, Donald Trump softened his tone and said Francis' remarks were "a little bit lighter ... than the press portrayed after I read a transcript." | AP Photo Trump dials it back on the pope

Donald Trump is downplaying his brief tiff with the pontiff, complaining in an interview Friday morning that the media had skewed the interpretation of Pope Francis’ response to a question about him.

Moments after media reports surfaced about the pope's remark that someone “who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Trump issued a blistering statement calling those comments “disgraceful” and warning, “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.”


During a taped telephone interview aired during ABC’s “Good Morning America,” co-anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Trump whether he thought his statement slamming the pope’s remark would hurt him going forward, including in Saturday’s South Carolina primary.

“Well you never know, George. I mean, with me it’s illegal immigration,” Trump said, referring to the first issue he brought up more than eight months ago, when he launched his campaign: “We want to have the wall, we have to have the wall, we have to stop the drugs from pouring in and the illegal immigrants from just absolutely pouring into our country.”

Repeating his usual rhetoric about building a wall to keep out drugs and undocumented immigrants, Trump commented that Francis’ remarks were “a little bit lighter ... than the press portrayed after I read a transcript.” The pope’s precise words do not specifically mention Trump but rather speak in general religious terms about anyone who constructs a wall instead of building bridges.

During Thursday night’s town hall event on CNN, the businessman had already begun dialing back his rhetoric, calling Francis “a wonderful guy.”

In an interview on MSNBC, Jeb Bush said he thought “it was probably inappropriate for the pope to intervene at the — in the height of a contested primary in that way.”

“He is a spiritual leader, he’s an inspiration, he’s the head of my church, so I’m cautious about this to be honest with you,” Bush said, “but I don’t think he helped anybody by saying Donald Trump’s not a Christian.”