The ‘Obamagate’ Distraction

Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: “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.”

“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.”