Trump-splain #Obamagate: A hashtag in search of scandal
As U.S. deaths from the coronavirus approached 92,000, the largest outbreak in the world by far, President Donald Trump was playing, “I Know Something You Don’t Know” with a reporter.
“In one of your Mother’s Day tweets,” The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker asked the president, “you appeared to accuse (former) President (Barack) Obama of ‘the biggest political crime in American history, by far.’ Those were your words. What crime exactly are you accusing President Obama of committing, and do you believe the Justice Department should prosecute him?”
“Uh, Obamagate, it’s been going on for a long time,” he slowly responded as if he was silently trying to sort out which version of reality he would trot out this time. “It’s been going on from before I even got elected and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on and if you look at now, all this information that’s being released — and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning — some terrible things happened.”
That was not an explanation. It was a Trump-splanation, the verbal equivalent of treading water as the sharks circle around, trying to hold him accountable for his own tweets.
When Trump then tried to move on, Rucker politely asked again, what exactly is the crime that Obama allegedly committed?
“You know what the crime is,” he said. “The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.”
The only thing “very obvious” about “Obamagate” is that it appears to be a hashtag in search of an actual scandal. Think of it as Trump-style target marketing, launched like code to provide his supporters with another excuse to ignore his controversial responses to the pandemic crisis.
Among the allegations: Obama and Joe Biden had advance knowledge of the FBI’s plans to interview Trump’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn about calls he had with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. during the 2017 presidential transition period.
With that knowledge, Biden allegedly requested the “unmasking” of Flynn, who turned up as an unnamed American in intelligence collected from the communications by foreigners under U.S. surveillance. Former Obama administration officials deny that Biden or Obama knew in advance about the FBI’s interview of Flynn, a contention that is backed up by the same documents that Team Trump cites to support their claims.
Besides, requests from the White House to unmask the identities of Americans who turn up in collected intelligence are hardly unusual. Several thousand such requests, including from the Obama and Trump administrations, are approved by the National Security Agency each year for authorized purposes.
But as we have seen with other Trumpian scandal charges, from birthers to Benghazi, this president does not need to have much “there” there to make groundless charges. All it took in this case was a biting critique from his predecessor about his handling of the pandemic.
An “absolute chaotic disaster” is how Obama described Trump’s handling of the pandemic in a recording obtained by Yahoo News of a conversation with veterans of his administration.
With the pandemic escalating, Trump was eager to change the subject. Even if he could not persuade new supporters with his shallow-as-a-birdbath attacks, he could boost spirits — and anger — in his own base with his old reliable BOF defense: Blame Obama first.
But if Trump wants to run against Obama, whose approval ratings still run higher than Trump’s, that’s hardly bad news for Democrats.