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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThis is why Trump is back to attacking Obama
It makes zero sense, you would think, for President Trump to attack his predecessor, since President Barack Obama is the most popular politician around (next to his wife) someone who instills in Democrats a feeling of solidarity, of nostalgia for decent leadership and of hope. Even those critical of Obamas presidency regard that era as akin to a Golden Age compared with the Trump calamity that brought us the Great Depression 2.0. And yet over the past week or so, Trump has rekindled Obamagate, a made-up scandal that has become a bumper sticker for Obama-haters. Trumps claims are so thoroughly baseless and hopelessly convoluted that Trump cannot even explain it. I side with CNNs Jake Tapper on this:
Jake Tapper
✔
@jaketapper
President Trump and his team are launching an unprecedented smear campaign against rivals, leveling wild and false allegations against critics in the media and politics, ranging from bizarre conspiracy theories to spreading lies about pedophilia and even murder. 1/
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Jake Tapper
✔
@jaketapper
· May 17, 2020
President Trump and his team are launching an unprecedented smear campaign against rivals, leveling wild and false allegations against critics in the media and politics, ranging from bizarre conspiracy theories to spreading lies about pedophilia and even murder. 1/
Jake Tapper
✔
@jaketapper
2/ These smear campaigns are unmoored from reality. They're deranged and indecent and seem designed at least in part to distract us from the horrific death, health, and economic crisis caused by the pandemic. The pandemic, which impacts you, is what we will continue to focus on.
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On Sunday, the president who dawdled while a pandemic spread across the country, got into a no-win trade war with China, hired a slew of incompetent and ethically challenged advisers and presided over the worst economic crash in 90 years decided to call Obama grossly incompetent. Talk about projection.
I have a couple theories as to why he is doing this now. No, it is not simply an effort to distract from Trumps meltdown or from the almost 90,000 deaths resulting from the pandemic. Trump could have chosen a more plausible conspiracy and a less popular target, but he picked Obama for a reason. Two reasons, actually.
First, Trump has been in a juvenile competition with his predecessor since the day he took office. Trump insisted the economy was stronger under him than under Obama. (That was false then and is now, well, self-evidently ludicrous.) Trump tore up the Iran deal and backed out of the Paris accords in part because Obama was associated with them. As it becomes patently obvious that Trumps presidency will go down as one of the worst in history and that his achievements are minuscule compared with Obamas, Trump becomes even more frantic to position himself as a superior president. It is the sort of thing a narcissist crumbling under the pressure of his own humiliation would do.
However, when one looks more carefully, a more specific different reason emerges for Trumps new round of Obama-bashing. Trump seeks to make Obama out to be a criminal or unfit. It goes back to the original sin of Trumps political career birtherism and to his campaign, which channeled cultural and racial animosity among whites against elites, nonwhites and immigrants.
Trumps effort to delegitimize the only African American U.S. president and to convince his followers that they are victims has been central to his political identity and to the bond with his cult. In times of political peril, as he was in the 2018 midterms when he invoked a caravan of migrants to stir his base, Trump always returns to white grievance. Just as birtherism made no sense but became a totem of the MAGA crowd, Obamagate now provides the same function of unifying, energizing and enraging Trumps camp.
When Trump is staring at international humiliation and political defeat, he first went to the well of anti-Asian xenophobia (e.g. imploring an Asian America reporter to ask China her question). When that fails to hit the mark, he goes back to his touchstone: racism directed against African Americans. He remains convinced that if he just gets his rabid base sufficiently engaged, he can pull out another improbable win. And prepare yourself: Should Biden select an African American vice president (as I think he should), the grotesque racism that will ooze from the right will make birtherism seem innocuous.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/18/this-is-why-trump-is-back-attacking-obama/#click=https://t.co/LQsTF9k0ti
sop
(10,226 posts)important surrogate during the 2020 campaign. Trump's attacks on Biden have totally flopped, even getting him impeached, so the POS is going back to his old, reliable, racist bag of dirty tricks.
Wounded Bear
(58,685 posts)SoonerPride
(12,286 posts)Do not put up with it.
Do not repeat it.
It is a marketing campaign and if you give it air and legitimacy it lives on.
Do not watch any channel or read any article that uses that trump marketing slogan.
sop
(10,226 posts)word, and its implied charge of crminality, like Hitler used The Big Lie, a propaganda technique described in Mein Kampf (1925): "a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." Trump continually uses corporate media to propagate his Big Lies.
SoonerPride
(12,286 posts)I won't stand for it
oswaldactedalone
(3,491 posts)Pass it on.
qwlauren35
(6,148 posts)I don't want a black woman on the ticket.
Not this year, not this time.
In the same way that I wanted a WASP male against a WASP male, I want a straight white male ticket, or a white woman so squeaky clean that no amount of sexist crap can touch her.
My gawd, they would eat Stacey Abrams for lunch. I don't know why anyone is so determined to lose by picking someone for the ticket who would rile up the MAGAts so that they spill over into the Independent base with hate and lies. America is still mainly white. And white America is still very prejudiced. I have no idea why people want to open that door AGAIN.
When I think about the white women MAGAts who said that Trump could grab their crotch any time, I knew that we did not have women's solidarity. They are more "white" than "women" in any way progressive. They probably laughed at the #metoo movement. "Boys will be boys".
That's what we're up against. Disenfranchised, disgruntled, prejudiced white people. The core of the Republican Party and Republican-leaning Independents.
They will grasp at ANYTHING to keep their TV huckster piece-of-shit white male president if it keeps them from anyone black on the ticket.