CHICAGO, Illinois — The day after President Barack Obama went viral for mocking Donald Trump with a visual gag that suggested the 45th president lacks BDE, one-time Obama senior adviser David Axelrod wouldn’t confirm or deny whether Obama was trying to get into Trump’s head.
Asked during a small gathering at Manny’s Deli on Wednesday about the “sort of Freudian inference” Obama made when talking about Trump’s focus on crowd size, Axelrod interrupted, “That may be your problem, my friend.”
The question made him chuckle, but he slyly avoided addressing head-on whether or not the comment had anything to do with Trump’s anatomy.
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“I don’t know,” he said. “I know this—I think that he thinks that, as he said, ‘cause he’s said it privately, that he thinks it’s supremely weird that this guy dwells on crowd sizes.”
In his speech to the convention Tuesday night, Obama said, “There’s the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes.”
He looked down at his hands, which he moved together so they had just a couple inches between them. The crowd roared.
And while not wading into it, Axe, as he’s known, seemed at once to relish the topic of—well, man size. “So you know, people can read into it what they want,” Axelrod said. “I’ll leave it to people with advanced degrees in psychology to decide what motivates Trump.”
But holding a dog-eared copy of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s new book, The Art of Power, and standing among election handicappers and political journalists at one of Obama’s favorite lunch spots, Axelrod couldn’t resist engaging in a little armchair psychology.
“I think one of the things that’s freaking Trump out about Kamala Harris is he judges the world in very specific ways,” he continued. “Ratings, how one looks on television, crowd sizes, social media. And on all these measures, all of a sudden, he was the dominant candidate and now someone else is the dominant candidate.”
All of the things, in other words, that are driving Trump crazy, especially as Harris pulls ahead slightly in the polls. “And it’s one of the things that I think is causing him to act out.”
The reporter who asked about Obama’s big moment pressed Axelrod to say more about whether the slight was intentional, but he refused.
“I know what you’re asking me!” he exclaimed. “I mean, I don’t know how many ways I can’t answer your question.”
