Francis Rooney
On May 8, Francis Rooney was at the Naples Yacht Club with friends when he received a text from his daughter: “DAD, IT’S BOB!”
That meant only one thing: the priest that Rooney had known in the Midwest and at the Vatican as “Bob,” Robert Prevost, had just been elected Pope, leader of the world’s more than 1.4 billion Catholics. Prevost would take the name Leo XIV, the first American pope.
This was one of the stories and insights that Rooney provided the Press Club of Southwest Florida in an appearance on Dec. 16 at the Hilton Naples.
It was quite a heady moment for the devout Catholic and Naples resident. Not only was Father Bob a personal friend but Rooney, as author of the book The Global Vatican: An Inside Look at the Catholic Church, World Politics, and the Extraordinary Relationship between the United States and the Holy See, could fully appreciate the meaning of this pope’s accession to the Throne of St. Peter.
“I can’t wait to take the kids over to go see him,” Rooney said. “I think he’s going to make great contributions. He’s a plain-speaking American in a world that’s not quite so plain-speaking. So we have good things to look forward to.”
Rooney, the retired head of the Manhattan Construction Group, where he spent his career building the multi-generation business he inherited, served as US ambassador to the Holy See from 2005 to 2008. In 2016 he ran as a Trump Republican for Congress in the 19th Congressional District, which stretches along the coast from Cape Coral to Marco Island. He won office in 2016 and served two terms before announcing his retirement in 2019 and stepping down at the end of 2020.
Rooney, 72, is no longer seeking public office, although he told audience members that he wouldn’t be averse to serving in an appointed position if called upon.
But Rooney characterizes himself as a “Bush Republican.” Asked which Bush, he named President George HW Bush, the 41st president, then amended his characterization, calling himself a “Reagan-Bush Republican.”
As such a Republican (who backed South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the 2024 Republican nomination race) Rooney brought some particularly knowledgeable political insights to the gathering.
Those insights were incisive, often in conflict with the president, and Rooney conveyed some dire warnings that had particular weight, given his knowledge and background.
Rooney was a Trump supporter during his time in Congress, especially when Trump approved $2 billion for Everglades restoration in 2017, at Rooney’s urging.
Still, Rooney said, “he’s not my cup of tea in a lot of things. He’s been very divisive. He’s been divisive to the body politic right now, and we’ll see how that’s going to play out, whether it’s going to be a JD Vance or whoever [who succeeds him]. I don’t know. I don’t like those guys. The guy I’m helping is Glenn Youngkin [former Republican governor of Virginia].”
Rooney said he looks for business savvy in politicians. “My litmus test for politicians is: are they a business guy first? Do they understand the morality that provides opportunity and livelihood for Americans? And that’s capitalism. And unfortunately, a lot of these elected folks have no clue.”
When it came to treatment of migrants—a particular concern of Pope Leo—Rooney was critical of Trump’s handling of people desiring to come to the United States.
“How can any human being be as hateful to other human beings as some of the words that are thrown around nowadays about immigrants?” he asked. “Now that doesn’t mean they all ought to come to the United States. It doesn’t get into the kind of conditions under which they should come. But as human beings, you’ve got to at least say they have human dignity, too.” He said that he probably employees 5,000 Hispanic workers, who are hard workers and are just seeking a better life.
He added some history: “Now, the saddest thing about immigration in the United States is if [Sen.] Harry Reid [a Nevada Democrat and at the time Senate majority leader] and the labor unions and a few right-wing nuts had not united to stop George Bush’s immigration reform program in 2007, this entire problem would not exist.”
He also emphasized the importance of immigration to American prosperity given the passing of the Baby Boom generation.
“Think about where this country would have been if there hadn’t been a baby boom in 1950,” he said. “Well, we don’t have that now and we need these workers, but we need the ones that most closely align to us. I’m a big proponent of Latin American immigration, and maybe that’s what’s going to happen in Latin America. But the other part is they share the Judeo-Christian ethic. They’re automatically closer to us than people from the other side of the world, which have nothing in common with us at all.”
When he was in Congress, Rooney fought to protect the eastern Gulf of Mexico from oil exploitation and the potential pollution from hazards and spills like the 2010 disaster at the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform.
Rooney had extensive experience in the oil industry and he brought that to Congress, trying to ensure that oil exploitation wouldn’t threaten Southwest Florida. In 2019 he succeeded in getting the full House of Representatives to pass a bill protecting the eastern Gulf. But when it died in the Senate, he went straight to Trump and convinced him to sign an executive order banning Gulf oil drilling. “Trump signed it in my presence, just me and him over the Resolute Desk,” Rooney recalled of the drilling ban. “Well, there’s rumors out here now that he’s going to try to modify it under pressure from oil companies.”
Rooney was also strongly critical of the current effort pushed by Trump to have congressional districts redrawn in mid-decade to benefit Republicans.
“…One of the errors that has been made in the last year has been decoupling the decadal census from redistricting,” he said. “That stability of every ten years we redistrict and letting the chips fall where they may [in terms of party representation], has been an important principle—if not in the Constitution—at least as an important principle. Now we’re just like a dang banana republic. We’re just like all these countries I spent my life traveling; Libya, Peru, India, lots of them. Venezuela used to be a good one, where they just changed rules every time they felt like it. I think it’s a horrific policy. It’s going to come back to hurt Republicans in ways they can’t even imagine. Indiana [which refused to redistrict] might have been the canary in the coal mine.”
For a man who received his share of lumps in interactions with the media during his congressional tenure, Rooney staunchly defended freedom of the press.
“I’ve never feared the press. I believe free press is one of the distinctive features of what makes America different than all these other sorry countries,” he said. He had witnessed revolutions in other countries where the rules of press coverage kept changing.
“And so I’m for the press being tough. And the tougher they are, the better,” he said. “I’m the only guy who likes to go to MSNBC [now MS Now]. I can’t learn anything from Fox. So I think the attacks on the press, people by the White House, are not good.
With extensive experience and knowledge of South America, Rooney was very skeptical of the current naval actions against boats in the Caribbean. If the boats were carrying drugs, they were likely destined for Europe and Africa. Boats in the Pacific likely were headed to the United States.
When asked why Congress wasn’t taking a more active role in pushing back against actions that might be illegal, especially in the Caribbean, Rooney opened up on his fellow Republicans.
“You know, there used to be a movie called The Stepford Wives,” he noted. “I’m really tired of our Republicans, guys that I’ve given a lot of money to, and I believe in their principles and their friends, cowering to the White House and not saying anything. They ought to be all over this thing. [Congress] ought to have made them disclose how they knew to hit those boats, have all the pictures out there and the videos so the American people can see what they did. It’s just very unusual to have the media so unable to bring the facts to the American people.”
He also denounced the Pentagon’s efforts to dictate what journalists report and its efforts to control how it’s reported.
“That’s a scary thing,” he warned. “That’s what happens in authoritarian regimes.”
Rooney recommended that his listeners read the book The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian-British author, which was published in 1944. Hayek warned that oppressive government control of economics could lead to tyranny.
“This is what happened in Germany. This is what happened in Russia. This is probably what happened under Genghis Khan… . You know, you have this creeping authoritarianism where the government’s telling everybody what to believe and what to read and what to do. That’s scary.”
David Silverberg is a retired journalist who spent most of his journalistic career in the Washington, D.C., area. He is a former reporter and editor for numerous defense and homeland security publications, as well as the former managing editor of The Hill.