US President Donald Trump will attend Pope Francis’ funeral along with First Lady Melania Trump tomorrow in the Vatican. Despite confirming that he would attend the funeral in person, he is likely to get a third-row seat at the event, the UK Telegraph reported. US media called it ‘humiliating’, especially after Trump famously mocked former president Joe Biden’s placement in the 14th row at Queen Elizabeth II’s 2022 funeral.
“This is what’s happened to America in just two short years. No respect. However, a good time for our president to get to know the leaders of certain Third World countries. If I were president, they wouldn’t have sat me back there – and our Country would be much different than it is right now. In real estate, like in politics and in life, location is everything,” Trump had mocked Biden.
The report said official details were not released but the seating arrangement is likely to follow that of the last funeral of a sitting pope, John Paul II, in 2005.
Foreign dignitaries will be seated in a large block to one side of Francis’s coffin, while archbishops, bishops, patriarchs and cardinals – the red-robed “princes of the Church” – will be seated opposite them, it said. The front row will be for the members of Catholic royalty and the second row will be for non-Catholic royals such as The Prince of Wales who will attend the funeral on behalf of King Charles III, along with the King and Queen of Sweden and the Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Norway.
The third row is not for Trump alone as all world leaders will be there, including Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president; Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister; and Javier Milei, the president of Argentina – Pope Francis’s home country.
The world leaders will be seated in alphabetical order, but the order is not of their names. According to the names of their countries in French, they will be sitting. And hence, there’s a speculation that Trump might have to sit beside Volodomyr Zelenskyy, because of the ‘U’ of US and Ukraine.
