20 May 2020

Fake Crime

The Atlantic published an excellent piece yesterday by two distinguished authors (link here) with the title "'Obamagate' Is Just Trump's Latest Effort at Distraction" and the secondary title of "From the very beginning of his administration, the president has sought to deflect attention from its original sin."

You've probably heard something about "Obamagate" on the news in recent days. Donald Trump makes out that it's a horrific crime, a crime of the century, except that he can't define exactly what it is, what went wrong, and how whatever it is might be illegal.

It is, indeed, obviously meant to distract people from Trump's disastrous handling of the coronavirus.

From the linked article: "The specifics of 'Obamagate' are less important than what it is not about: the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 90,000 Americans partly as a consequence of Trump's own catastrophic and ongoing failures of governance. Trump's invocation of 'Obamagate' gives his fans something to seize on—and the political press something to cover—instead of the ineptitude of Jared Kushner's pandemic task force or the consistent lack of personal protective equipment at hospitals or the government's failure to establish the many drive-through testing centers Trump promised in mid-March."

And: "Tweeting about 'Obamagate' also draws attention away from Trump's firing of four successive inspectors general since the pandemic began, a decapitation of government oversight that The Washington Post describes as the president's 'push to rid the federal bureaucracy of officials he considers insufficiently loyal to or protective of him and his administration.'… The more focus there is on figuring out what Trump is asking for when he demands accountability for the Obama administration's many and unspecified crimes, the less there is on the accountability Trump is systematically eliminating within his own administration."

Be sure to pass the link for this piece along to anyone throwing around allegations about "Obamagate." If they can read all the big words, it should shut them down.

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