Trump Responded to Obama’s DNC Speech by Pushing His ‘Obamagate’ Conspiracy Theory

President Donald Trump took familiar notes on Twitter while responding to former President Barack Obama’s speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention on Wednesday evening. Trump once again repeated the false accusation that the former president spied on his 2016 campaign and got caught. And he made Obama wait until April, when the primary was essentially over, to approve former Vice President Joe Biden.

The tweets came after Obama offered his sharpest criticism to date of Trump’s presidency, describing him as unfit for office.

“I was hoping, for the good of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; so that he could come to feel the weight of the office and discover a certain reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care, ”Obama said. “But he never did. For almost four years now, he has shown no interest in doing the job; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone other than himself and his friends; no point in treating the presidency as anything more than a reality TV show that he can use to get the attention he needs.

Trump, in turn, tossed out a few all-caps tweets and then shared a video taken during one of his White House press conference appearances explaining that he wouldn’t have been elected in the first place if Obama and Biden had not. such a bad job.

Trump’s claim that Obama spied on the 2016 Trump campaign is part of a baseless conspiracy theory called Obamagate, which claims that left-behind Obama-era “deep state” government officials have tried to undermine the Trump administration since the president took office. . The claim was quickly refuted by the FBI and NSA in 2017; however, Trump refused to accept this and repeated his false statement throughout his first term.

Trump also targeted Obama’s choice to stay above the fray during the Democratic primary – as Obama met and gave advice to any campaign that requested it, he didn’t approve of anyone, including his former vice president, until Joe Biden had everything but landed the nomination.

Trump too retweeted many posts of his ally, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who took Obama’s record on the job for “slow economic growth” and “rogue Justice Department”. Trump has presided over a collapsing economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, and his Justice Department has regularly faced accusations of abusive loyalty to the president above the law.

Trump’s tweets are really nothing new. Trump is a strong – and frequent – critic of Obama and his presidency, beginning his criticism of his predecessor even before joining the 2016 Republican primary. Prior to his political career, Trump was perhaps the strongest provider of the racist Birther conspiracy theory that the former president was not born in the United States. This criticism – along with complaints about the military, family separation, and even the country’s coronavirus preparedness, which did not exist when Obama was president – continued throughout Trump’s first term, though ‘Obama has now been out of office for more than three and a half years.

Obama, however, largely refrained from commenting on Trump or his track record, focusing instead on encouraging people to vote. Wednesday night’s speech was a departure for him, breaking an unwritten rule that former presidents should not directly criticize sitting presidents.

But Obama – like the rest of the country – watched from afar as Trump reworked the government for himself and his friends, then failed to respond adequately to the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic collapse. . He clearly felt the need not to hold back, arguing that if Trump is re-elected there will be “no democracy at all.”

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