1. Susan Glasser: “Obamagate” Is Niche Programming for Trump Superfans

Hating on Obama, lying about him, blaming him: these long ago became the default settings of Trump’s Presidency. When Trump is troubled or cornered or simply deciding what to do, he often finds a way to bring Obama into it, no matter how tenuous or even absurd the connection. He has called Obama a “bad” person, a “sick” person, “a disaster,” “the most ignorant President in our history,” and even the “founder of isis.” Barely more than a month into his Administration, in early March of 2017, Trump accused Obama of secretly wiretapping him at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign, an allegation that was no more true than any of the other nutty things Trump has said about Obama since then.

During the course of the pandemic in the past couple of months, Trump has repeatedly invoked Obama and sought to blame his predecessor for everything from the lack of a sufficient national stockpile of medical supplies to inadequate testing for the coronavirus, which did not exist when Obama was President. Trump often mentions Obama’s handling of the H1N1 swine flu, which killed twelve thousand Americans, but which Trump nonetheless claims was a disastrous contrast to his own deft handling of a national crisis that has so far tanked the American economy and killed more citizens than the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. In fact, the President made a point of it again on Thursday afternoon during an appearance in Pennsylvania. For Trump, spending the week attacking Obama, no matter what the subject, is the political equivalent of retreating to his bedroom and hiding under the blanket. It’s his safe space, his comfort zone. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/obamagate-is-niche-programming-for-trump-superfan

2. Philip Rucker, Matt Zapotosky, Robert Costa and Shane Harris: How a Flynn theory became central to the Trump reelection campaign

With Trump suffering political damage for his management of the coronavirus pandemic less than six months before the election, the president’s government appointees and allies in Congress are using their powers to generate a political storm aimed at engulfing Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and Obama, who polls show is the nation’s most popular political figure, making him a potent threat to Trump as a Biden surrogate.

Another objective is to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation as Trump has long sought, by casting Flynn as a martyr wronged by nefarious bureaucratic elites.

These efforts are being amplified by wall-to-wall coverage on Fox News Channel and elsewhere in conservative media, where this week Flynn coverage has rivaled and at times overshadowed news about the pandemic, even as the U.S. death toll from the novel coronavirus climbed past 85,000. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/seven-days-of-obamagate-how-a-flynn-theory-became-central-to-the-trump-reelection-campaign/2020/05/14/e698bfba-960b-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html

3. Brian Beutler: Trump Begins His Final Authoritarian Push

Under cover of awful darkness—85,000 dead Americans, nearly all of whom should be alive today, and a great depression of his own making—President Trump has accelerated his efforts to dismantle the rule of law in America. Those efforts have now reached an end stage where, having successfully manipulated the justice system to jailbreak his coconspirators and place those who investigated them under investigation themselves, he will now endeavor to use it to deprive his enemies of their freedom for his own political advantage.

Trump couldn’t have made so much progress toward this goal without the encouragement of Republicans in Congress, nor an opposition party that long ago decided it wouldn’t oppose him on the basis of his general lawlessness—nor perhaps without a national press corps that varyingly sanitizes or revels in that conduct.

But he also couldn’t do it without mass deception—a fabricated tale in which his enemies are corrupt, and he is just. There’s no such thing as OBAMAGATE, not even Donald Trump can tell you what it means. But that meaningless word has already been broadcast unfiltered into the homes and Twitter apps of millions of Americans, along with a blizzard of lies designed to give it the appearance of meaning. And Republicans won’t stop until it, like BENGHAZI, EMAILS, and BURISMA before it, creates a miasma of scandal around Democrats that makes it impossible for many voters to say one way or another which party is headed by a crook, and which is not.

The truth of the matter at the heart of the coming disinformation campaign isn’t hard to grasp, particularly for those who have more than passing familiarity with the details of the Russia investigation or the Mueller report. But that doesn’t mean Trump’s propaganda campaign won’t work—or, worse, that people won’t find themselves under indictment, facing years in prison, as part of a desperate bid to help Trump win re-election and spare him from legal consequences of his own. https://crooked.com/articles/trump-final-authoritarian-push

4. Alexandra Petri: Obamagate was the worst crime ever committed and here is what it was

“What is the crime exactly that you’re accusing him of?”
“You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.”
— Trump responding to Washington Post reporter Philip Rucker

Obamagate began long ago, long before Trump even got elected, before he even knew he was running. It began before America, before time, in those early days when President Barack Obama lit the furnace of the sun, just before he fixed the paths of the planets in such a way that millennia in the future, Donald Trump would stare directly into a solar eclipse. And, of course, everyone knew about it.

There is more to come about Obamagate, and we will be stunned, because the horror of it all is clear. One of the many facets of Obamagate is that it prevented people from telling Michael Flynn that lying to the FBI was a crime, even if they were investigating something else; had he realized this, he would not have lied to the FBI, probably? It is a commonly known fact (just as commonly known as that Obamagate is ancient and horrible) that it is polite to lie to the FBI unless you are explicitly instructed not to.

Obama is still president to this day, which is why everything that goes wrong is his fault. But that will change soon. Donald Trump is here and can point this out. The rule of law is suffering from the people in charge of the government right now. Their pandemic response has not been all that could be hoped. It is a total disaster and an absolute fiasco, what is going on in the White House right now, or, as I guess we must refer to it, Obamagate. And everyone knew exactly what it was. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/13/obamagate-was-worst-crime-ever-committed-here-is-what-it-was/

5. Caleb Ecarma: Trump’s “Obamagate” Obsession Finds A Friendly Audience On Fox

Egged on by a Fox interviewer on Thursday, Donald Trump insisted that his administration is the victim of the worst government conspiracy in U.S. history, a likely preview of his reelection messaging strategy. “This is the greatest political scam, hoax, in the history of our country,” said the president, adding that “people should be going to jail for this stuff,” remarks that Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo agreed with. “It is the biggest political scandal we’ve ever seen,” she concurred.

As the pandemic’s devastation continues, and with the November election just over five months away, Trump and his media allies have spent the past week intensely focused on so-called Obamagate, with the president incessantly tweeting and discussing it. On Monday, the president, after spending Mother’s Day sharing of Obamagate–related tweets, used the White House’s coronavirus presser to attempt to break down the conspiracy. “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,” he said. “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.” When pressed for an exact crime, the president eschewed specifics: “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/fox-news-donald-trump-obamagate-obsession

6. Philip Rucker, Matt Zapotosky, Robert Costa and Shane Harris: How a Flynn theory became central to the Trump reelection campaign 

With Trump suffering political damage for his management of the coronavirus pandemic less than six months before the election, the president’s government appointees and allies in Congress are using their powers to generate a political storm aimed at engulfing Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and Obama, who polls show is the nation’s most popular political figure, making him a potent threat to Trump as a Biden surrogate.

Another objective is to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation as Trump has long sought, by casting Flynn as a martyr wronged by nefarious bureaucratic elites.

These efforts are being amplified by wall-to-wall coverage on Fox News Channel and elsewhere in conservative media, where this week Flynn coverage has rivaled and at times overshadowed news about the pandemic, even as the U.S. death toll from the novel coronavirus climbed past 85,000.

And in a remarkable turn Thursday, Trump urged Congress to call Obama to testify and even suggested those involved — including Biden and two longtime Trump antagonists, former FBI director James B. Comey and former CIA director John Brennan — go to prison.

“I’m talking with 50-year sentences,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network that aired Thursday. “It’s a disgrace what’s happened. This is the greatest political scam, hoax in the history of our country. . . . People should be going to jail for this stuff. ”

Trump added, “This was all Obama. This was all Biden. These people were corrupt — the whole thing was corrupt — and we caught them.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/seven-days-of-obamagate-how-a-flynn-theory-became-central-to-the-trump-reelection-campaign/2020/05/14/e698bfba-960b-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html

7. Peter Baker: Changing Subject Amid a Pandemic, Trump Turns to an Old Ploy: Obama

Donald Trump has embarked on an aggressive new drive to rewrite the narrative of the Russia investigation by making dark and unsubstantiated accusations that former President Barack Obama masterminded a sinister plot to bring him down.

On Twitter, on television, in the Rose Garden and even on an official White House social media page, Mr. Trump in recent days has taken aim at his most recent predecessor in a way that no sitting president has in modern times, accusing Mr. Obama of undefined and unspecified crimes under the vague but politically charged catchphrase “Obamagate.”

The president went even further on Thursday by demanding that Mr. Obama be hauled before the Senate “to testify about the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA,” a scenario that itself has no precise precedent in American history. Within hours, Mr. Trump’s most faithful Republican ally in the Senate promptly announced that he would indeed investigate, although he would probably not summon Mr. Obama.

In flinging incendiary charges at his predecessor, Mr. Trump has offered no evidence and has not even specified what “crime” he was accusing the former president of committing. Instead, Mr. Trump seemed to be tying the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, which has enraged him for years, back to Mr. Obama while hinting ominously at forthcoming revelations that will bolster his claims. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/us/politics/trump-obama.html

8. Robert J. Samuelson: Trump’s failure of leadership makes a feeble economy and resurgent virus more likely

There are times when nations must do unpopular and painful things — and those are the times when a country needs a leader. Ours has gone missing in action. Worse, President Trump is actually subverting leadership. The resulting vacuum of power feeds confusion and chaos, as mayors, governors, members of Congress, doctors and scientists all strive to fill the vacuum.

The job of a leader in a crisis — and the coronavirus pandemic is a genuine crisis, not just an outburst of alarmism — is to forge a consensus that enables a society to deal with the crisis. This is hard. It requires the leader to explain things that are usually difficult to explain. And explanation is not enough. People must be persuaded to do or accept things that they oppose or don’t support.

The point here is not to argue for one position or the other. It is to recognize the difficulty of creating consensus in democratic societies. It’s especially hard when the nation’s nominal leader spurns the leader’s traditional role — that’s what Trump has done. A true leader would have used the bully pulpit to mobilize public opinion to accept changes that we don’t like but that can’t be avoided. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-leadership-vacuum-makes-a-feeble-economy-and-resurgent-virus-more-likely/2020/05/17/b53a62c4-96cf-11ea-9f5e-56d8239bf9a

9. Jack Shafer: How Not to Listen to Donald Trump

Despite a lack of interest from his minions in Congress (Graham has said he has no plans to grill Obama), Trump’s foggy demagoguery has mobilized the entire press corps to determine what the hell Trump is talking about. Explainers from Reuters, the Washington Post, the Guardian, CNN, and elsewhere struggle to decipher Trump’s vague but strident accusations with little success. We can say this much with certainty. It appears linked to the counterintelligence operation against Gen. Michael Flynn in late 2016, and the requests from Obama administration officials that his identity be “unmasked” from intelligence reports so they could understand who, exactly, was talking to the Russian ambassador. Flynn lied to the FBI about speaking to the ambassador about sanctions and later pled guilty to lying to the FBI about those conversations. (Unmasking, by the way, is a routine, not nefarious thing, which the Trump administration has requested thousands of times.) But until Trump uses his words to make his charges about Obama more specific, we can only guess at what the actual crime might be.

Why must we fetch every bone that Trump hurls into the high, prickly brush? Well, he’s the president, and he wouldn’t make such an extreme charge if it weren’t true, would he? But he does, and he does all the time. This tidy list from Business Insider demonstrates his historic capacity for making baseless but grotesque claims of criminality and deception: implicating Ted Cruz’s father in the Kennedy assassination; claiming that Obama wasn’t born in the United States; surmising that Justice Antonin Scalia did not die of natural causes; accusing Joe Scarborough of complicity in the death of an intern; asserting massive voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election; saying windmills cause cancer; connecting the Clintons to Jeffrey Epstein’s death; and the Bidens-in-Ukraine baloney.

Now it could be that Obama did commit the biggest political crime in the history of the USA. If there’s a shred of evidence, I want Obama investigated. If the investigation bears fruit, I want him to have a fair trial. If he’s found guilty, I want him punished. But show me that shred of evidence first or I’m going back to bed. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/05/15/how-not-to-listen-to-donald-trump-260938

10.  Peter Slevin: The Trump Campaign Brings Its Angry Tone to the Coronavirus Era

Donald Trump, Jr., the President’s eldest son, thinks that his father is getting a raw deal. In a recent appearance on “Team Trump Online”—a nightly video series that serves as a substitute for campaign rallies and often attracts more than a million viewers—he complained that his father is having to wage war against “the deep-state guys” and unchecked attacks from “influencers on the other side.” He said that each reporter at the White House briefings “has an agenda, and that is to destroy Donald Trump.” Joe Biden “can’t remember where he is fifty per cent of the time,” Trump, Jr., said, but he can count on the “media lackeys” who are the “marketing wing of the Democrat Party.” The Democrats, he added, are “becoming the party of socialism and communism.” That includes Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib—“you know, the Hamas caucus in Congress.” As for the covid-19 outbreak, which has caused more than eighty thousand deaths in the U.S. to date, he said, “China basically screwed the whole world.”

Venom and victimization largely define the President’s public persona, and the same holds true for the online campaign. Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee in early March, and the covid-19 pandemic put a halt to barnstorming a few weeks later, but the rhetoric of Trump’s campaign has barely budged. On March 12th, as the coronavirus crisis was taking hold in the United States, it e-mailed its supporters a photograph of Trump, ruddy face fully made up, a flag pin in his lapel, sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, looking steely. The e-mail said that there is “no room for partisanship, and the President is calling on both parties in Congress to unite.” The very next day, when Trump declared a national emergency, the campaign reverted to form, blasting “Sleepy Joe” and “Crazy Bernie.” Last weekend, after the Justice Department dropped its charges against Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I., the campaign crowed, in a fund-raising text, “Justice for Gen Flynn! A witch hunt from day 1! all gifts tripled to drain the swamp.”

In hundreds of different versions of its standard pitch, Trump’s campaign complains, boasts, and beseeches. The President, his surrogates, and the campaign staff spray a familiar buckshot of belittling nicknames and insults at a cast that includes “Sleepy Joe,” “Crazy Bernie,” and “Crooked Hillary,” who were recently joined by “Cheatin’ Obama.” An e-mail on Monday, targeting Biden, asked supporters to “show the Left that you reject their corrupt candidate,” while one on Friday called Biden “a certified CROOK.” During a recent “Team Trump Online” broadcast, Parscale bragged about “a roll of Hillary Clinton toilet paper that I use every time I’m in a bad mood. I have boxes of it, and I take it into the bathroom, and it’s just enjoyable.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/campaign-chronicles/the-trump-campaign-brings-its-angry-tone-to-the-coronavirus-era

11. David Smith: It eats him alive inside': Trump's latest attack shows endless obsession with Obama

But what became clear during the three and a half years of Trump’s presidency is that Obama remains something of an obsession for Trump; the subject of a political and personal inferiority complex.

Observers point to a mix of anti-intellectualism, racism, vengeance and primitive envy over everything from Obama’s Nobel peace prize to the scale of his inauguration crowd and social media following.

Ben Rhodes, a former Obama national security aide, tweeted this week: “Trump’s fact-free fixation on Obama dating back to birtherism is so absurd and stupid that it would be comic if it wasn’t so tragic.”

“Birtherism” was a conspiracy theory that Trump started pushing in 2011 (“He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one but there is something on that birth certificate – maybe religion, maybe it says he’s a Muslim, I don’t know.”) . Nine years later, he has come full circle with “Obamagate”, which accuses his predecessor of working in league with the “deep state” to frame Trump for colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election.
There is zero evidence for this claim. Indeed, a case could be made that the supposed “deep state” did more to help Trump than hurt him when the FBI reopened an investigation into his opponent, Hillary Clinton, just before election day. When questioned by reporters, Trump himself has struggled to articulate what “Obamagate” means. Ned Price, a former CIA analyst, dubbed it “a hashtag in search of a scandal”.

Trump and his allies in the Republican party and conservative are stepping up to build a parallel universe where this is the big story and Obama is at the center of it. Sean Hannity, a host on Fox News, demanded: “What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?” Over the past week, the channel’s primetime shows have devoted more coverage to the bogus crimes of “Barack Hussein Obama” than to the coronavirus pandemic – and Trump’s mishandling of it. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/16/trump-obama-obsession-coronavirus-president

12. Max Boot: If Trump had been in charge during World War II, this column would be in German

The 75th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany got me thinking about how World War II might have turned out if President Franklin D. Roosevelt had acted like President Donald J. Trump.

Picture the scene a few months after Pearl Harbor. The first U.S. troops have arrived in England, and the Doolittle raiders have bombed Tokyo. But even though the war has just begun, the Trumpified FDR is already losing interest. One day he says the war is already won; the next day that we will just have to accept the occupation of France because that’s the way life is. He speculates that mobilization might be unnecessary if we can develop a “death ray” straight out of a Buck Rogers comic strip. He complains that rationing and curfews are very unpopular and will have to end soon. He tells the governors that if they want to keep on fighting, they will have to take charge of manufacturing ships, tanks and aircraft. Trumpy FDR prefers to hold mass rallies to berate his predecessor, Herbert Hoover. He even suggests that Hoover belongs in jail along with the leading Republican congressmen — “Martin, Barton and Fish.”

In reality, of course, Roosevelt focused with single-minded devotion on defeating the United States’ enemies until the day of his death. Old political battles and agendas fell by the wayside. “Dr. New Deal” had been transformed, he explained, into “Dr. Win-the-War.”

Trump, by contrast, cannot focus on a single subject for the length of a paragraph. So it is no surprise that he has already gotten bored with a war against the coronavirus that isn’t going his way. He is taking his cues not from FDR but from Sen. George Aiken, the Vermont Republican whose plan for the Vietnam War was summed up as “declare victory and get out.” In Trump’s case, that means getting Americans out of the home whether it’s safe to do so or not.

Coronavirus deaths are surging past 86,000 and unemployment claims past 36 million, but Trump sounded on Monday as if the pandemic is already over. “We have met the moment and we have prevailed,” he declared. It’s as if Roosevelt had declared Victory in Europe before D-Day. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/15/if-trump-had-been-charge-during-world-war-ii-this-column-would-be-german/

13. Doyle McManus: We won’t end COVID-19 with ‘test and trace’

To hear public health experts describe it, defeating the coronavirus is a massive but straightforward problem, difficult but not impossible while waiting for a vaccine.

First, administer tens of millions of tests to find out who has the disease. Then trace all their recent contacts, using a cellphone app that tells the government whom they met. Finally, track down all those people and order them into isolation for 14 days, possibly in a quarantine hotel.

Now think about that scenario.

In a country where armed men are marching to defend their right not to wear masks, how will intrusive measures like those go down?

Answer: Not easily.

We’ve already seen widespread protests against the shutdown orders imposed by many governors — protests encouraged, bizarrely, by President Trump, even though the governors are following White House guidelines. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-05-17/column-we-wont-end-covid-19-with-test-and-trace

14. Sean Illing: The fake “Obamagate” scandal shows how Trump hacks the media

We’ve been introduced to a new conspiracy theory this week: “Obamagate.”

There’s no point in unpacking this theory here because it’s bullshit and everyone knows it. (If you need an explainer, my Vox colleague Jen Kirby has you covered.) But for the sake of a reference point, here’s the simplest version possible: “Deep state” holdovers from the Obama administration allegedly spearheaded the prosecution of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn as part of a broader scheme to undermine the Trump presidency.

I really don’t want to offer any more details because, again, this is a bullshit story. (Trump, despite promoting it endlessly, couldn’t even explain it when asked by a reporter.)

The important thing here is not that this theory is false. The important thing is that we’re talking about it at all, and we’re only talking about it because the president wants us to talk about it. Talking about this non-story means we’re talking less about, say, the nearly 85,000 Americans who have died so far from the coronavirus or the impending recession.

Watching the media pounce on this story like greyhounds chasing mechanical rabbits has been painful, but also deeply familiar. It’s a pattern we’ve seen unfold countless times. The president unleashes a tweetstorm, millions of people retweet it, right-wing media boosts the signal, and then mainstream media outlets cover it, often breathlessly.

Consider this Axios tweet stating that “Biden’s presence on the list could turn it into an election year issue, though the document itself does not show any evidence of wrongdoing.” But Biden’s name on a document is only an election issue if the press treats it like one. And if the “document itself does not show any evidence of wrongdoing,” why the hell are we talking about it? Again, we’re talking about it because Trump talked about it and now it’s a legitimized “story.” https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/5/16/21258788/obamagate-trump-flynn-bannon-flood-the-zone

15. Margaret Sullivan: The media is helping Trump turn the bogus ‘Obamagate’ into the 2020 version of Clinton’s emails

It’s becoming clear that journalists never fully reckoned with the mistakes of 2016 campaign coverage. We know this because they seem poised to repeat them.

As you may recall, the news media — from Fox News to the New York Times and plenty of others across the political spectrum — managed to make the relative molehill of Hillary Clinton’s dicey email practices into a daily obsession, roughly equal to the mountain of Donald Trump’s financial and personal transgressions.

Well, don’t look now but this is happening again before our eyes. Its name this time is “Obamagate.” That’s a moniker that, in President Trump’s outraged tweets, is rendered in all capital letters, but let’s not.

This vaporous, apparently made-up offense, according to Trump, is the political crime of the century — and, heck, last century too, because he claims that it makes the 1970s Watergate scandal look like child’s play. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-is-helping-trump-turn-the-bogus-obamagate-into-the-2020-version-of-clintons-emails/2020/05/18/c5382f82-9907-11ea-89fd-28fb313d1886_story.html

16. Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Carrie Dann and Melissa Holzberg; Even in these unprecedented times, Trump's playbook never changes

Ignore the experts, attack the referees and undermine global institutions.

That’s the unmistakable takeaway from President Trump’s recent actions after he’s fired multiple inspector generals.

After he’s — once again — railed against the news media and cheered on supporters who curse at local reporters.

After he’s picked yet another fight with the World Health Organization, threatening to permanently freeze its U.S. funding.

These events are all new, but the pattern has been the same throughout Trump’s entire presidency.

When you ignore the experts, attack and fire the referees, and undermine institutions — no matter all of their imperfections and mistakes — you make it clear that you’re the only one in charge and will do whatever you please, as Politico writes this morning.

And that’s the antithesis of America’s democracy (with all of its checks and balances), as well as its federalism. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/even-these-unprecedented-times-trump-s-playbook-never-changes-n1210201

17. Charlotte Klein: Groundhog Day From Hell: Trump’s 2020 Strategy Invokes 2016 Whiplash

The president and his campaign’s attacks on Joe Biden’s character seem right out of the playbook that proved effective against Hillary Clinton—but even some Republicans aren’t sure it’ll work the second time around.

In seeking reelection, President Donald Trump appears to be reviving the political strategy that got him to the White House, bombarding Joe Biden with attacks and allegations much like those lobbed at 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton. As the Associated Press reports, Trumpworld is “dusting off the playbook that helped defeat” Clinton by trying to frame the upcoming election as one “between a dishonest establishment politician and a political outsider being targeted for taking on the system.” The difference in 2020, the AP notes, is that “the so-called outsider is the sitting president of the United States.”

According to long-time Biden adviser Mike Donilon, Trump’s allegations of personal and family corruption—claiming Biden’s son, Hunter, profited off the vice presidency and his recent “Obamagate” obsession—are part of the campaign’s attempt to create distraction. “We have a president who doesn’t want to talk about the central issue in this campaign right now,” Donilon told the AP, acknowledging that the “all-out effort to try to take people away from what they’re living through” is a tactic that “has succeeded in the past in terms of throwing up distractions and smokescreen.”

And based on Trump 2020 spokesman Tim Murtaugh’s remarks, the ugly political tactics waged against Biden in recent days are merely a taste of what’s to come. “We have only just begun to define Joe Biden using his own record, particularly on his softness on China, and it’s working.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/groundhog-day-from-hell-trumps-2020-strategy-invokes-2016-whiplash

18. Chris Megerian, Noah Bierman and Eli Stokols: Trump lashes out with distractions and disinformation

Trump has accelerated his attacks on government watchdogs, judges, reporters and other independent voices as he runs for reelection, escalating his spread of disinformation about perceived enemies and his administration’s record during the COVID-19 crisis.

Experts struggled to think of a historical parallel where the president has turned the world’s most powerful and influential office into a megaphone for wholesale fabrications and bizarre claims in an effort to confuse voters and salvage his own political future.

“Trump is certainly not the first politician to lie or invent stories,” said Eileen Culloty, who researches disinformation at Dublin City University in Ireland. “But his history of making baseless, conspiratorial claims — whether it’s Obama’s birth certificate, linking Ted Cruz’s family to the Kennedy assassination or now Obamagate — is striking for its scale and frequency.”

“He is in a class by himself,” said Kathryn Olmsted, a UC Davis history professor who has studied post-Watergate political reforms. “He doesn’t feel constrained by rules or optics or norms.” https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-05-18/trump-lashes-out-with-disinformation

19. Charles M. Blow: Stop Airing Trump’s Briefings!

Simply put, the media was complicit in Trump’s rise. Trump was macabre theater, a man self-immolating in real time, one who was destined to lose, but who could provide entertainment, content and yes, profits while he lasted.

The Hollywood Reporter in February of 2016 quoted CBS’s C.E.O. as saying, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” because as The Reporter put it, “He likes the ad money Trump and his competitors are bringing to the network.”

I fear that history is repeating itself.

For over a month now, the White House has been holding its daily coronavirus briefings, and most networks, cable news channels and major news websites have been carrying all or parts of them live, as millions of people, trapped inside and anxious, have tuned in.

The briefings are marked by Trump’s own misinformation, deceptions, rage, blaming and boasting. He takes no responsibility at all for his abysmal handling of the crisis, while each day he seems to find another person to blame, like a child frantically flinging spaghetti at a wall to see which one sticks.

He delivers his disinformation flanked by scientists and officials, whose presence only serves to convey credibility to propagandistic performances that have simply become a replacement for his political rallies. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/opinion/trump-coronavirus-briefings.html