With Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony inspiring more Democrats to summon the courage to speak out in favor of impeachment, Donald Trump is responding with his typical strategy of “deny, deny, deny.”
Trump is also frightened enough by the public response to the clear and unfettered revelations of his obstruction of justice to up the ante on the second tactic in his defensive quiver: “distract, distract, distract.”
The president — facing increasingly serious questions about the legitimacy of his election — is well known for projecting his own guilt upon his perceived opponents and for portraying himself as the victim of a vast left-wing conspiracy against him.
So it’s only natural that he would combine those two habits into a vicious attack on his predecessor, President Barrack Obama.
Apparently, the potency of Trump’s false smear campaign against his former opponent in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, is delivering diminishing returns as her practically non-existent public profile renders the president’s harping on about her emails toothless in the face of the revelations about his own administration’s improper use of non-authorised email servers for government business.
Thus Trump has directed his ire at Obama with a brand new conspiracy theory that accuses his predecessor of some sort of unspecified wrongdoing related to his presumably lucrative post-presidential book deal.
Speaking to reporters at the White House today, Trump again decried the exhaustive Mueller probe as an unjustified fishing expedition, despite the fact that it has already resulted in prison time for several of his closest campaign aides — a fate that only the Justice Department ruling prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president saved him from himself.
“They want to investigate, they want to go fishing and I watched Bob Mueller and they have nothing,” Trump told the White House press.
“It’s a disgrace,” he continued. “We want to find out what happened the last Democrat president. Let’s look into Obama the way they’ve looked into me. From day one they’ve looked into everything we’ve done,” he peevishly complained, as if the public did not deserve to examine the actions of a leader who had publically called for the asistance of Russian hackers during his campaign.
“They could look into the book deal that President Obama made. Let’s subpoena all of his records,” Trump continued. “Let’s subpoena all of the records having to do with Hillary Clinton and all of the nonsense that went on with Clinton and her foundation and everything else,” said Trump in a rant that hinted at his penchant for demanding that the government illegally bend to his authoritarian will in retaliation against his political opponents.
It was not just the book deal that Barack and Michelle Obama signed with Penguin Random House publishing after leaving the White House that Trump attacked his predecessor over.
In a sign of his petulant pettiness, the latest occupant of the White House harshly criticized Obama for what Trump considers the poor quality of the air conditioning system installed in the West Wing during the Obama era.
“It was so good before they did the system,” Trump declared, despite never having worked in the West Wing while the old system was operating. “Now that they did the system, it’s freezing or hot in here.”
While this sounds like the typical complaint of a cranky old man with declining mental capacity, one has to wonder whether Trump would have made the same complaint if a white Republican had been his predecessor.
Whatever your opinion on that question, it’s fairly obvious that Trump would find something bad to say about President Obama even if he were proven to have healed the sick and raised the dead.
Actually, given how many people were healed due to their ability to participate in the Obamacare programs that Trump has — mostly fruitlessly — done everything in his power to repeal, the first half of that last statement has already been proven to be accurate.
You can watch Donald Trump call for using the government resources at his disposal to improperly wreak vengeance on his political opponents in the video excerpt below.
Trump is now openly threatening to investigate Obama: "We want to find out what happened with the last Democrat president. Let's look into Obama the way they've looked at me … they could look into the book deal that President Obama made. Let's subpoena all of his records." pic.twitter.com/uDO0kL9QfA
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 26, 2019
His complaints about the White House AC system are in the clip below.
Trump claims the air conditioning system for the west wing was better before Obama changed it; how would he know? pic.twitter.com/MVB7xAOVwj
— Christopher Bouzy (@cbouzy) July 26, 2019
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Original reporting by Brett Samuels at The Hill.
