Conservative Washigton Post columnist Jennifer Rubin explained in her Monday piece that President Donald Trump’s latest conspiracy theory about former President Barack Obama is really just another attempt to bring back birtherism to distract from his coronavirus failures.
“On Sunday, the president who dawdled while a pandemic spread across the country, got into a no-win trade war with China, hired a slew of incompetent and ethically challenged advisers and presided over the worst economic crash in 90 years decided to call Obama ‘grossly incompetent.’ Talk about projection,” Rubin began.
She explained that it’s clear Trump is attempting to distract from his failures and clamoring to find someone else to blame. She said that Obama is a natural target for two main reasons.
“First, Trump has been in a juvenile competition with his predecessor since the day he took office,” wrote Rubin. “Trump insisted the economy was stronger under him than under Obama. (That was false then and is now, well, self-evidently ludicrous.) Trump tore up the Iran deal and backed out of the Paris accords in part because Obama was associated with them. As it becomes patently obvious that Trump’s presidency will go down as one of the worst in history and that his achievements are minuscule compared with Obama’s, Trump becomes even more frantic to position himself as a superior president. It is the sort of thing a narcissist crumbling under the pressure of his own humiliation would do.”
But the new round of Obama-bashing is a whole other issue than Americans have seen before.
“It goes back to the original sin of Trump’s political career — birtherism — and to his campaign, which channeled cultural and racial animosity among whites against elites, nonwhites and immigrants,” wrote Rubin.
It’s more of an attempt to delegitimize the only African-American president in United States history and “convince his followers that they are victims has been central to his political identity and to the bond with his cult.” When in crisis, Trump always turns to racism, she explained, citing the 2018 election when he invented a “caravan” of migrants attempting to invade the United States.