Obamagate vs Covidgate
By: Jay Sizemore
Tags: Obamagate, Covid 19, Propaganda, Politics, Donald Trump

Obamagate vs Covidgate

Trump and the Art of Distraction

Photo by visuals on Unsplash

In recent weeks Donald Trump has been stirring up his base again with accusations that former President Barack Obama was the purveyor of a massive conspiracy against him, this time pulling the term OBAMAGATE out of his word-salad hat and seeing if it will stick to the wall. It began, like most things with Trump, on Twitter, where he started randomly sending out messages with OBAMAGATE in all-caps, accusing Obama of being the most corrupt president in history, with zero evidence to back the claim.

Screenshot, Twitter

This barrage of Tweets had everyone wondering what on Earth he was referring to, already a victory for Trump before he even pins the illusory tail on the donkey of his big misinformation scheme. Asked by a reporter at a press conference about the tweets, Trump merely said, “It’s been going on for a very long time … You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody.” Finally, with help from key Republican senators like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, the red herring was dropped that the Obama Administration must have been using the FBI to spy on Trump (this being a lie repeated since 2018), and that when Obama unmasked Michael Flynn (asked to see his name that had been redacted from foreign surveillance reports) they somehow broke the law.

The conspiracy theory allegation from Trump about being spied on by the Obama Administration, aside from making zero sense logistically (if true, how did it not manage to negatively impact the outcome of the election?), has already been tried under a different name, when it was previously coined as Spygate. What was untrue in 2018, remains untrue in 2020. The facts have not changed. But what has changed is that the DOJ, led by Barr, dropped the charges against Michael Flynn, although Flynn already pleaded guilty to the charges of lying to the FBI about his knowledge of the dealings with Russia. This gives the Trump Administration a perception of credibility, where it still has none.

What about the unmasking of Michael Flynn? This is yet another attempt by the Trump Administration to create a large strawman out of nothing, as unmask requests on intelligence briefings are in fact quite common, it is just a request by White House officials to see the redacted names of agents on reports of foreign surveillance. In fact, the Trump Administration has made more unmasking requests than the previous administration.

Screenshot, Twitter

So, what is happening here? This is yet another smokescreen of misinformation issued by Trump to distract from the crisis currently wreaking havoc in the country, a crisis that in many ways was exacerbated by the current leadership, or lack thereof. It is not the first, nor will it be the last, just as it is not the first or last time Trump has attempted to pivot attention from his own failings by placing blame on Obama instead. This is a tactic that plays directly to his fanbase, because the hate for Obama still burns bright in their ranks. In this case, it is a return to a tactic that is proven to work well, much like a performer going back to their classic hits when their new songs don’t play as well to the crowd, like his other most recent distraction technique, of telling the country he has been taking the drug hyroxychloroquine.

These shifts of blame since the Covid-19 outbreak began have been transparent and easily proven false. In addition to the Trump tactic of blaming China and the World Health Organization for a conspiratorial cover-up, despite it being well-documented that Trump was given warnings well in advance of the contagion, Trump has blamed the Obama administration for not leaving any plans of action, for not leaving supplies, and for not providing good tests (for a virus that didn’t yet exist). Again, these are merely distractions, meant to displace attention from the facts that we are already nearing 100,000 covid-19 American deaths (since February) and our economy is in shambles with record numbers of people on unemployment (44 million) while we still have no established methods of widely available testing for the virus.

The facts remain that Obama provided the Trump Administration with:

1. A pandemic playbook (shredded)

2. Stockpiles of supplies (unused)

3. A pandemic response team (decommissioned)

Screenshot, Twitter

Trump is, quite frankly, the lead general in the information war, and it is a war that he continues to win, because he is the continued focal point of the daily news. Everything he says is news, which automatically grants him more power to sway the narrative than any other source on the planet. From the moment he decided to run for president, he was granted this power. He has rightly keyed on this fact, and uses it to his advantage every chance he gets. This is why nothing he has done that would normally and rightfully be considered a negative has any lasting impact to his image or to the perception of his character to his fans. Trump just continues to constantly shift the narrative and shift the blame, and the media has no choice but to report what he says, which does nothing but fuel the fanaticism of the Trump Cult. It is a perpetual feedback loop at this point. The only way to stop it is to remove Trump from office, but good luck, as so much damage has already been done, any successor to him will likely be just as bad.