A pro-Trump CNN panelist raised eyebrows when he detailed a perceived plot to undermine the president that apparently goes all the way to the heart of the Vatican.
“This is 100 percent political, OK?” Hal Lambert, a Republican donor and member of Trump’s 2017 Inaugural Committee, told his astounded fellow panelists and host Abby Phillip on Monday night. “This is all about trying to hurt President Trump’s Catholic vote during the midterms and Republicans in the midterms.”
Lambert then encouraged the other panelists to “play out the dots here” on the supposed Vatican plot to hurt Trump, noting that David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former chief strategist, visited Pope Leo XIV last week, and that there is now talk of former President Barack Obama himself heading to the Vatican sometime in the near future.
He went on to note that Leo, like Axelrod and Obama, is from Chicago. “All of a sudden, now, Pope Leo is out attacking Trump and the policies of the United States and Israel,” he said of the pontiff, who has consistently criticized the Trump administration since he assumed the papacy last year.
“You have three cardinals come out today, attacking the immigration policy,” he went on. “This is all about trying to get the Catholic vote against Trump.”
Lambert did not address the possibility the president himself may in fact be doing the supposed work of those conspirators, following his 334-word Truth Social tirade against Leo on Sunday, which he promptly chased with an AI rendering of himself as Jesus Christ.
“Hal, there are… just, a lot of flaws in this argument,” Phillip gently pushed back. “There’s no flaws, there’s no flaws, there’s no flaws!” Lambert insisted.
“Axelrod is the chief strategist for Obama,” he went on. “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 then chastised the highest authority in the Catholic Church for what he felt was not doing enough to criticize the Iranian regime over its brutal killings of protesters earlier this year.
“When Iran killed 30,000-plus of their own citizens, he didn’t call out the Iranian regime at all,” he raged. “He said we need to stop violence. That was very milquetoast, that wasn’t calling out the Iranian regime, and yet he’s calling out the United States and Israel.”
Fellow panelist Father Edward Beck, an author and Catholic priest, responded by taking Lambert straight to Sunday school. “He says war is never the solution,” Beck said. “He’s not taking sides in this, he’s trying to live the gospel message, and preach it. Simple as that.”
