In the past four days, Trump got preoccupied of sorts on his favorite social media platform and tweeted about unfounded accusations that former commander in chief Barack Obama concocted a plot to destroy the White House's new boss and his minions: "He got caught, OBAMAGATE!" Trump lashed out Sunday on Twitter.
It was one of the 126 tweets and retweets that Trump had to unleash to make him hog the headlines, unsurprisngly, only this time it veered away from a most urgent and worrying subject -- a pandemic that's showing no signs of let-up. Trump did manage to etch a new record for the day, though: the second-highest single-day total tweet of his presidency, all because of BO.
So, what is Trump's beef with Obama that on a Sunday, when many of his constituents were trudging through stay-at-home late-morning Mother's Day pies and fried chickens, the incumbent US leader was all fired up on his Twitter feed. Dead serious.
First, the suffix "gate", which is a frequently used amalgamation on the Watergate scandal that overthrew President Richard Nixon in 1973. To dumb it down, the 1972 Republican presidential reelection campaign, despite their candidate having an absolute lock on a victory, thought they'd sneak in, snoop and steal from the opposition headquarters; what they dug to find is unclear. Bad move, they got busted, President Nixon tried to cover the whole thing up, and it didn't work. The more the Republicans tried to cover the whole thing up, the worse the mess got, until Nixon had to resign.
Going back to Trump. His all-caps and exclamation point-riddled tweets and retweets provided his 80 million followers an outrageous narrative to a conspiracy conjecture that had been making the rounds on conservative online portals for over a year - namely that top honchos in Obama's admin framed top Trump executives early in his tenure in the Oval Office in order to derail his presidency.
The theory, as Trump's backers call it, is that Obama was involved in an attempt to entrap Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser who pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Justice Department moved to dismiss Flynn's case last week, giving the theory more relevance, as did newly disclosed papers that outline the early phases of the Flynn investigation. But the specifics are somewhat overcast.
Attorney General William Barr's reversal on Flynn was not enough for Trump, who's now taking advantage of Flynn's vindication to point the finger at Obama for illicitly using the Justice Department to target his adversaries, calling for a criminal probe into the former POTUS, FBI and Justice officials who served under him.
In a filing, Atty. Barr argued that the investigation has never been justified to begin with and Flynn's ensuing guilty plea should be ignored. While many in the legal sphere clamored against it, Trump jubilated on Barr's decision and promised "MUCH more to come!"
On the other side of the coin, supporters of Trump claim that members of the Obama inner circle improperly sought to probe Flynn over contacts he made with the envoy to Russia. Trump's volley of tirades against Obama's hand in the case came after audio was leaked Friday where BO said the "rule of law is at risk" after the Flynn case was scrapped.
After the report where Obama could be heard in a released private call criticizing Trump's handling of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and calling it "an absolute chaotic disaster," it was no surprise that Trump would go after the ex-president fast, no holds-barred.
Meanwhile, despite Trump whining for the Justice Department to investigate Obama, top Republican allies are not on the same boat. "I am not anticipating calling President Obama," said Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, as per Politico report.
Trump's nearly single-minded focus on his fantastical conspiracy theory does accomplish one thing: It takes his election-period-missive emphasis away from the pandemic that has claimed the lives of over 82,000 people in the US. His Obamagate imagination diverts the spotlight on the so-called wrongs he has been subjected to at the hands of Democrats -- rather than the White House's cliched downplaying of the crisis.
