May 13th 2020

By Bill Berkowitz 

If you think that November’s presidential election will be pairing President Donald Trump versus former vice-president Joe Biden, think again. Trump’s most consistent bogeyman during his entire administration, has been President Barack Hussein Obama, and undoing Obama’s legacy has been a benchmark of the Trump presidency. With Trump in the middle of his confused and bungling response to the coronavirus pandemic, it appears that desperate times call for Roy Cohn-like attack dog measures: Flip the script, accuse Obama of being the motivating factor in the Trump/Russia investigation, and demand the Republican-controlled Senate bring Obama and former officials in for questioning. As Fox News host Brian Kilmeade recently opined, “When this election happens, it’s not gonna be Biden against Trump. It’s gonna be Obama against Trump.”

Trump’s Mother’s Day weekend tweet-tsunami featuring #ObamaGate, was likely motivated by Obama’s having called Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as “an absolute chaotic disaster.” A tweet from QAnon summed up the frenzy stirred up by Trump’s Mother’s Day tweet-storm: “When the world is finally shown the truth about #ObamaGate will the Lame-stream media finally get on board or will they go down with the ship?”

“After the Justice Department’s abrupt decision last week to drop the criminal case against Flynn, Trump shifted his public focus over the weekend to mount a three-day tear against his predecessor on Twitter, accusing Obama of committing the ‘biggest political crime in American history,’” Politico’s Andrew Desiderio and Kyle Cheney recently reported. “Trump sought to popularize the hashtag ‘ObamaGate,’ which he said makes the Watergate scandal ‘look small time.’ Trump also said Obama ‘got caught’ and later retweeted comments by Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, who said Obama was part of an effort to frame and entrap her client.”

Over the past week or so we’ve begun to hear the term ObamaGate batted around by Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Piro, and Jesse Watters. And if you’re prone to dismiss these utterances as mere fantasies, think about how the shameless myth-hustling of the Swift Boaters that helped take down the candidacy of John Kerry in 2004.

BuzzFeed reported that On Saturday night, May 9, “Trump tweeted five Fox News clips: One from Sean Hannity’s Hannity, two from Jeanine Pirro’s Justice With Judge Jeanine, and two from Jesse Watters’ Watters’ World. All of the clips were about a supposed ‘coup d’état,’ as the Fox anchors called it, committed by the Obama administration during the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. ‘Obamagate, that's the subject of tonight's 'Watters Words' segment, Watters said. ‘The Obama people got caught this week and it looks like it goes straight to the top.’"

On Fox’s Watter’s World, host Jesse Watters claimed “Sources are telling Watters’ World that Attorney General Bill Barr was just given a trove of smoking gun documents that could point directly at former President Barack Obama, revealing his powerful connection to ‘Spygate’ and the Russia hoax.”

“At the core, the thing that scares Obama and Biden is the truth,” former House Oversight Committee Chair Jason Chaffetz then said during a Fox News interview Monday. “It’s hard to believe that there is anything other than direct acknowledgment and direction from the president of the US to the FBI director, who then does things a couple of weeks later that is totally unprecedented in storming, in that the White House, putting this ambush together, and going after General Flynn like we’ve never seen before.”

With the phrase ObamaGate floating around earlier this week, the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker asked President Trump to define it at the White House coronavirus press conference:

Rucker: In one of your Mother’s Day tweets, you appeared to accuse President Obama of “the biggest political crime in American history, by far” — those were your words. What crime exactly are you accusing President Obama of committing, and do you believe the Justice Department should prosecute him?

Trump: Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected, and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on, and if you look at now, all this information that’s being released — and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning — some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again. And you’ll be seeing what’s going on over the next, over the coming weeks but I, and I wish you’d write honestly about it but unfortunately you choose not to do so.

Rucker: What is the crime, exactly, that you’re accusing him of?

Trump: You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.

If Team Trump feels like they are hitting pay-dirt with #ObamaGate, they will fill Trump in on some of the details. Trump the primary promoter of the Birther conspiracy against Obama, is picking up where he left off. However well Obama-bashing may do on Fox News and in the dark corners of the Internet, but the former president still remains a popular figure with a majority of Americans.