Taking #Obamagate Seriously

President Trump’s bonkers theory, explained.

It is easy to overlook some of the everyday corruptions that President Trump has inflicted on the body politic. After all, his unique blend of logorrhea, mendacity, and clownishness creates an atmosphere that lends itself to dismissing his daily absurdities. But when we just shake our heads and say that’s just Trump being Trump, we are buying into the false framing preferred by the president and his defenders: that he is a successful leader with great acumen for political gamesmanship and yet also at the very same time an amateur who does not understand the impact of his own words, and should not be taken seriously.

The president’s recent obsession with #Obamagate is a stark example of this.

On the surface, Trump’s deranged Mother’s Day tweetstorm and the halfhearted trolling of his predecessor at his Monday press conference seem like just a couple more examples of the mad king feeding his fans a juicy porterhouse—in this case, a theory about President Obama’s supposed crimes that is so stupid that even the president himself can’t answer the most basic question about it.

But underneath the palpable jealousy and the desperate attempt to change the subject to something, anything besides the slow-motion pandemic-management disaster that he is overseeing, is a very real effort by President Trump and his enablers to undermine the rule of law, rewrite the history of the 2016 election, and give a hall pass to a hostile foreign power for its interference in our election. Trump’s allies in the conservative media and the Justice Department are taking #Obamagate very seriously. This conspiracy theory is informing our foreign policy, millions in tax dollars are being spent in an effort that is going “full throttle” to prove that it is correct, and countless Americans are being fed a faux history involving a crime that supposedly “makes Watergate look small time.”

In that context, “President Fabricates Crimes By His Predecessor” should be front-page news, an unprecedented assault on the office of the president and our system of justice. An action that under any previous president would have sparked a massive backlash from within his own party among institutionalists concerned about both their short-term political interests and the broader historic implications.

Much more: https://thebulwark.com/taking-obamagate-seriously/