Former President Barack Obama clapped back at Donald Trump’s outlandish accusations of treason and a weird, AI-generated video that emerged showing him being arrested, calling the whole charade “crazy stuff” and “not normal.”
You’re not used to seeing Obama get in the political mud, but this time, even his famously disciplined campaign team just said Enough is enough.
The drama unfolded after Trump, during a speaking engagement in the Oval Office, levied unfounded allegations that Obama led a secretive operation to undermine the 2016 election. “This was treason,” Trump declared. “They tried to take the election. “They attempted to undermine the election.” He even called Obama “the leader of the gang” and suggested harsh punishment.
Then there was the social media grenade: an AI-manipulated video that Trump retweeted of a fictional Obama arrest. That digital stunt, designed to go viral, quickly drew blowback for disseminating outright falsehoods. Detractors derided it as dangerous and irresponsible, and Obama’s camp went even further.
Patrick Rodenbush, a spokesman for the former president, broke a normally deferential silence from the office to deliver a rare, sharply worded blowback. “We usually don’t dignify such spurious claims with a response,” Rodenbush said, “but some people are just so desperate and have so little to offer the American people that their only path to relevancy is to spread lies.”
He dismissed the claims as “bizarre” and said Trump was playing to sensationalize the heat surrounding his administration, which was the subject of multiple ongoing probes.
Adding fuel to the chaos was a new and contentious report by the Director of National Intelligence. The unsupported report accuses Obama and other top intelligence officials of trying to unseat Trump in a “coup,” and obtained no bipartisan support. However, intelligence analysts and fact-checkers across the political spectrum, including Republicans, have overwhelmingly dismissed the claim.
Even the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was led at one point by a Republican, Senator Marco Rubio, reiterated that although Russia did attempt to influence the 2016 election, there had never been any evidence produced to show that vote tallies were changed and no proof that Obama conducted some secret operation to take it down.
Obama’s team did not pull punches in framing this as an act of political theater. “It’s a poor effort to distract,” Rodenbush said, noting that nothing in the contested report calls into question the conclusion that Russia meddled in the 2016 race, which has been documented elsewhere.
Trump’s base may be thrilled by the theatrics, but for many, this latest move is more of Trump’s rewriting of history or, at least, his muddying of it. And Obama’s pushback comes as there’s a growing willingness among Democrats to take the fight nationwide, part of a belief that if Trump can go virtually anywhere in the country and try to tear down institutions at will, Obama himself should be able to travel and call Trump out at the same time as he also calls people to vote.
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