Trump Retreats to His Safe Space

Susan Glasser: “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.”

“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.”