“Obamagate” Is Niche Programming for Trump Superfans
Ma
Donald
Trump will not shut up about Barack Obama—not now, not ever. On Thursday
morning, amid the gravest economic crisis in a century and a deadly pandemic that
will have killed more than a hundred thousand Americans by the end of this
month, Trump yet again accused his predecessor of
culpability in “the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the
USA.” Obama, he said, should be hauled before the Senate to testify. “He knew
EVERYTHING,” Trump added in his tweet, one of dozens of attacks in the past few
days in which he has targeted “Obamagate.” What crime, exactly, was Trump
accusing Obama of? What should he testify about? Trump never said, and it’s a
safe bet that he never will.
On
Monday afternoon, at a press conference on the White House lawn, Trump made
that clear, in a memorable exchange with Phil Rucker, of the Washington Post,
that echoed the paranoid fulminations of Trump’s hero Joseph McCarthy at his
worst. “What crime, exactly, are you accusing President Obama of committing?”
Rucker asked. “Obamagate,” Trump replied. “It’s been going on for a long time,”
he added, without offering specifics. “What is the crime, exactly, that you’re
accusing him of?” Rucker asked again. “You know what the crime is,” Trump
answered. “The crime is very obvious to everybody.” Days later, that is still
where we are: Trump is accusing Obama of a grave crime but refusing even to say
what Obama allegedly did, while repeating over and over that the former
President is guilty of something, a technique of political agitprop that
recalls not only McCarthy but every wannabe dictator for whom the rule of law
has little or nothing to do with accusations of illegality.
Perhaps,
to Trump and his defenders, “Obamagate” really is such a known commodity that
defining it is superfluous, even if it is not at all obvious to those who don’t
populate Trump’s alternate reality of conspiracy theories and outright lies, a
world in which Obama figures as a regular and sinister presence. This is not
the first time, nor will it be the last, that the gap between partisan truths
in Washington is so wide it’s practically a vortex. In many ways, the
“Obamagate” exchange on Monday reminded me of the first day of the public impeachment
hearings last fall in the House Intelligence Committee, in which Democrats
spent hours outlining what they knew of the Trump Ukraine-shakedown scheme that
had triggered the impeachment proceedings, while Devin
Nunes, the Republican ranking member, offered up an array of
little-known intrigues that seemed entirely unrelated to the matter at hand,
including an alleged plot to “obtain nude pictures of Trump,” which, he said,
was part of a “three-year-long operation” by Democrats, “the corrupt media,”
and “partisan bureaucrats to overturn the results of the 2016 election.” I
remember thinking: Naked pictures? What was he even talking about? It appeared
to have something to do with a 2017 phone call to Representative Adam Schiff
from two Russian pranksters claiming to represent the Ukrainian government and
offering nude pictures of Trump with a Russian celebrity. Or something. If you
had been following along with Fox News and the darker corners of the right, you
knew exactly what Nunes was talking about.
The
same is true right now with Trump, who, starting with an anti-Obama tweet storm
on Mother’s Day that does not seem to have ended yet, has been trying to
deflect attention from the pandemic by pursuing a similar strategy to the one
that he, Nunes, and other supporters used during the impeachment proceedings.
To the extent we can even discern what Trump is talking about, “Obamagate”
seems to be the perfect crime for someone like Trump to allege: it is vague and
all-encompassing, a conspiracy against the current President so broad that it
apparently began before he won an election nobody expected him to win while
simultaneously explaining away everything from the Mueller investigation’s
findings to the Ukraine-extortion scheme that got Trump impeached. Inasmuch as
Trump’s allegations are connected to a real criminal case, it is the
still-unravelling mess involving his own former national-security adviser Michael
Flynn, who was fired by Trump and pleaded guilty twice to lying to
investigators about his dealings with Russia, but who now claims he was framed
by the F.B.I. and has got Trump’s Justice Department to abandon the case that was successfully
mounted by its own career prosecutors. These, needless to say, are not the kind
of facts that Trump has brought up when slinging his accusations against Obama,
which seem to currently revolve around a list of former Obama Administration
officials who—completely legally, as far as anyone can tell—asked to “unmask”
the name of an unidentified American dealing with foreign officials after the
election, who turned out to be Flynn. “People should be going to jail for this
stuff,” Trump told an interviewer on Thursday. “This was all Obama. This was
all Biden. These people were corrupt, the whole thing was corrupt, and we
caught them.”
To
outside observers, the charges—like Trump’s original political sin, lying about the easily provable fact of
Obama’s birth in the United States—seem so absurd as to be the mere caricature
of a conspiracy, as sketched by a con man who couldn’t even bother to offer
convincing details. The point, though, is not to convince those who aren’t
already in the know.
“Obamagate” is niche programming for the Trump superfan
audience. If you don’t get it, that doesn’t matter; you’re not supposed to. It’s
a slogan, a rallying cry. Details are all but irrelevant. At 8:57 p.m. on Wednesday, Trump sent out
an all-caps tweet. The message consisted solely of the word “OBAMAGATE”
followed by an exclamation point. To those not following Trump as a daily soap
opera, it might seem like a desperate diversionary tactic from a floundering
President. To his supporters, it made perfect sense.
Which is why, when Trump
followed up on Thursday morning with an equally angry and cryptic demand that
Obama be called to testify before the Senate—about what was entirely
unclear—news organizations mostly ignored him in favor of the morning’s
testimony by the recently fired head of vaccines at the Department of Health
and Human Services, or, as the Drudge Report called Richard Bright, the
“whistleblower of doom.” Except for Fox News, that is, which obliged the
President with a banner headline.
Hating
on Obama, lying about him, blaming him: these long ago became the default
settings of Trump’s Presidency. When Trump is troubled or cornered or simply
deciding what to do, he often finds a way to bring Obama into it, no matter how
tenuous or even absurd the connection. He has called Obama a “bad” person, a
“sick” person, “a disaster,” “the most ignorant President in our history,” and
even the “founder of isis.”
Barely more than a month into his Administration, in early March of 2017, Trump
accused Obama of secretly wiretapping him at Trump Tower during the 2016
campaign, an allegation that was no more true than any of the other nutty
things Trump has said about Obama since then. During the course of the pandemic
in the past couple of months, Trump has repeatedly invoked Obama and sought to
blame his predecessor for everything from the lack of a sufficient national
stockpile of medical supplies to inadequate testing for the coronavirus, which
did not exist when Obama was President. Trump often mentions Obama’s handling
of the H1N1 swine flu, which killed twelve thousand Americans, but which Trump
nonetheless claims was a disastrous contrast to his own deft handling of a
national crisis that has so far tanked the American economy and killed more
citizens than the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. In fact, the
President made a point of it again on Thursday afternoon during an appearance
in Pennsylvania. For Trump, spending the week attacking Obama, no matter what
the subject, is the political equivalent of retreating to his bedroom and
hiding under the blanket. It’s his safe space, his comfort zone.
Since the beginning of
his anti-Obama rant on Mother’s Day morning, Trump has tweeted and retweeted
attacks on the former President thirty-three times, by my count, with around a
dozen of those referring to the vague but nefarious “OBAMAGATE.” On Wednesday,
Trump forwarded to his Twitter followers a video, from 2016, of Obama
suggesting that Trump could never become President. “Obama was always wrong!”
he tweeted.
Although he never did spell out what it is, Trump promised his
followers at one point, “OBAMAGATE makes Watergate look small time!” It’s as
though he sees an attack on Obama as a political get-out-of-jail-free card,
with the mere mention of Obama’s name an incantation of such political force
that invoking it can miraculously rally Trump’s Obama-hating base.
But
is there really political magic for Trump in this? The numbers don’t suggest
it. Obama remains broadly popular with the American public, certainly far more
so than Trump has ever been.Trump has been attacking Obama vociferously for the
past three years of his Presidency, without those attacks demonstrably
affecting either his or Obama’s over-all popularity.
Why should “Obamagate,”
coming as it does in the midst of a true national emergency, be any different?
Yet, in seeking to explain the latest Trumpian distraction, Brian Kilmeade said
on Fox the other day that this was in fact a strategic move by the President,
an effort to reset the fall campaign from a race between Trump and the
presumptive Democratic nominee, Obama’s former Vice-President, Joe
Biden, into “Obama against Trump.”
Maybe,
but I don’t buy it. Trump has been running this play for a long time already,
and it seems to me not so much about electoral politics as it is a reflection
of the ongoing temper tantrum that is Trump’s response to the global pandemic—a
catastrophe that has upended Trump’s Presidency and may well spell his
political doom. It’s about his fury at being impeached, and his rage at having
as an enemy a virus that doesn’t give a damn about his Twitter feed. Trump’s
attacks on Barack Obama, above all else, are a barometer for measuring the
level of Trump’s raging insecurity, and what they tell us now is that Trump is
having an enormous meltdown, almost certainly connected with his diminishing
prospects for reëlection.
This
seems to be Obama’s interpretation, too. On Friday, in a phone call with
several thousand supporters that was quickly leaked, Obama called Trump’s
response to the pandemic an “absolute chaotic disaster” and warned that the
“rule of law” was at stake in Trump’s efforts to undo Flynn’s conviction. He
then refrained from comment for days as Trump’s latest storm against him raged.
Finally, at 2:44 p.m. on
Thursday afternoon, Obama responded with a one-word tweet of his own. It said,
simply, “Vote.”
