If anybody suffers from a derangement linked to President Donald Trump, it is not the opponents who viscerally object to our current president’s malignant narcissism, unending lies and determined manipulation of what is un-American in us.
Actual Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is among those who so blindly support our current president. They imagine that opposition to him arises not from simple decency but from conspiracies hatched against him simply because he is Trump.
In one manifestation of real TDS, Trumpers discerned a sinister plot at work when longtime Obama strategist 71-year-old David Axelrod was granted an April 9 audience with Pope Loe XIV at the Vatican.
Axelrod is Jewish, but he feels a bond with the Pope as a fellow son of Chicago and dedicated White Sox fan.
Axelrod is also the father of a developmentally disabled daughter who found secular salvation and happiness in a remarkable residential facility founded by a nun on the city’s North Side and run under the auspices of Catholic Charities.
“For the first time, her days were rife with activities and her life was filled with friends,” Axelrod wrote in The New York Times in 2021. “While she has the care and supervision she continues to need — and always will — she also is more independent than we ever could have hoped.”
Axelrod added, “Most of all, she is happy. Genuinely happy.”
Axelrod’s daughter celebrates her birthday every year by going with her friends to a White Sox game. He and his wife, Susan Landau Axelrod, marked last year’s outing by presenting each in the group with a memento honoring the team’s new number one fan, the recently elevated Pope XIV.
“We gave them all Sox jerseys they were selling with Pope Leo and the number 14 on the back,” Axelrod told The Daily Beast in a text.
Axelrod and his wife took pictures of their happy daughter along with her buddies and arrived at the Vatican with a perfect gift.
“We have him photos of them with their backs to the camera and facing,” Axelrod texted.
In more recent days, some Catholic sufferers of real TDS suggested online that there was something suspect about a Jewish Democratic political strategist getting a papal audience even a lifelong Catholic would have trouble securing. But the difference in faiths may have actually helped Axelrod. Leo is proving to be a pope who embraces the Latin origin of pontiff. Pontifex means bridge builder.
The real TDS sufferers further suggest that Axelrod traveled to Rome to prepare for an Obama sitdown with Pope Leo to further a Democrat scheme.
“Barack Obama doesn’t need me. If he wants to visit with the Pope," Axelrod told The Daily Beast on Thursday, “I suspect he would be received. He doesn’t need any intermediary.”
Axelrod says it is equally silly to propose that his papal audience had anything to do with the Pope’s criticism of Trump’s bombing of Iran.
“For the longest time, I’d been trying to find a way to get to see him,” Axelrod told the Daily Beast on Wednesday. “Finally, a couple months ago, I got a date, an audience... I sure didn’t know when, when I got that date, that we would be at war.”
Axelrod played no role in the Pope’s opposition to war and advocacy for peace. But real TDS sufferers such as Republican analyst Hal Lambert saw a sinister plot.
“This is 100% political, ok? This is all about trying to hurt President Trump’s Catholic vote during the midterms and Republicans in the midterms,” Lambert said on CNN on Monday. “If you look at what... play out the dots here. David Axelrod goes and visits Pope Leo last week. They’re talking about Obama going to visit Pope Leo. Pope Leo is from Chicago. All of a sudden, now, Pope Leo is out attacking Trump and the policies of the United States and Israel.”
Lambert further noted that three cardinals had voiced opposition to Trump’s immigration policies.
‘Hal, there are just a lot of flaws in this argument,” CNN host Abby Phillip told him.
“There’s no flaws,” Lambert insisted.”Axelrod is the chief strategist for Obama. The pope is saying he’s not political. Why is he meeting with the chief strategist for both Obama’s campaigns and in the White House?’
Lambert told the Daily Beast on Thursday, “[Axelrod’s] not Catholic, he’s not Protestant. He was born Jewish…They’re not talking theology.“
He continued, “Within days, you have three Cardinals, come out and do a 60 Minutes interview. And then you have the Pope ratchet up his attacks on Trump. So, I mean, I’m just laying out the facts of what happened.”
The Trump administration continued to dismiss Pope Leo’s pronouncements. Vice President JD Vance, a recent Catholic convert, said the pope “should be careful” when talking about theology.
“In some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality,” Vance advised, as if that did not include war and social justice.
Down in Miami, the Trump administration canceled $11 million contract for a Catholic Charities program that had tended to unaccompanied migrant children for decades. The move raised the specter that other Catholic programs might be targeted.
On Thursday morning, the news site Catholic Arena posted on X photos of Axelrod and his wife meeting with the Pope. They are presenting him with the birthday photos of their daughter and her friends in the White Sox jerseys with Leo and 14 on the back.
Numerous sufferers of real TDS posted comments.
One read, “So, doesn’t take long to have a private few minutes with the Holy father and pass private messages from prominent democrats or coordinate strategy.”
Another read, “LOL, a Jewish man who has never met Leo and yet gets a private meeting with Leo to give him baseball photos….OMG! Nice AI generated pictures as well! You liars are going to burn in Hades.”
And another, “So this non-Catholic private citizen gets over an hour with the Pope just because his daughter is in a Catholic run home? When do the parents of the other children there get an audience? Nothing at all to see here!”
And another, “If I was planning to meet and recruit the Poope (sic) into a conspiracy to overthrow a sitting US president, I’d want to make that meeting appear like it was no big deal. Maybe even exchange a few benign souvenirs in a photo op.”
And yet another, “Sure thing: a notorious political operative (and non-Catholic) like Axelrod travelled all the way from the U.S. to Italy and went through all the necessary hassle to get a private audience with the Pope, just to give him a couple photos of the White Sox. Seems legit.”
Or maybe just deranged.
