As American deaths from the coronavirus approached 85,000, the largest outbreak in the world by far, President Donald Trump was playing, “I Know Something You Don’t Know” with a newspaper reporter.
“In one of your Mother’s Day tweets,” The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker asked the president last week, “you appeared to accuse (former) President (Barack) Obama of ‘the biggest political crime in American history, by far.’ Those were your words. What crime exactly are you accusing President Obama of committing, and do you believe the Justice Department should prosecute him?”
It was the kind of question that Trump and his devoted MAGA supporters routinely call “hostile,” “nasty” or “fake news.” How dare we journalists quote this president’s own words back to him – especially when he doesn’t have a good answer.
“Uh, Obamagate, it’s been going on for a long time,” the president responded, slowly at first, as if he was silently trying to sort out which version of reality he would trot out this 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 – 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.”
“Disgrace?” “Going on for a long time?” “Terrible things happened?” That was not an explanation. It was a Trump-splanation, the verbal equivalent of treading water as the sharks circle around, trying to hold him accountable for his own statements and tweets.