Anything But The Truth: Obamagate, The New World Order, and an Abdication of Responsibility
As America speeds past 90,000 dead of the coronavirus and the economy continues its disastrous freefall, Donald Trump and Fox News have rolled out their newest distraction: Obamagate. This follows on the heels of the Department of Justice flaunting its lawlessness by dropping charges against disgraced General Mike Flynn, clearing the way for a new offensive strategy of claiming that former president Barack Obama and, by extension, Vice-President Joe Biden, were involved in an unconstitutional investigation against Donald Trump and his assorted cadre of criminals.
The narrative is in full force. Every night on Fox is filled with one story of Obamagate after another, the stories growing more and more hyperbolic by the day. It’s something to talk about besides the disastrous mishandling of the pandemic and it serves multiple purposes, including scapegoating the failure, harming Biden’s campaign for the presidency, and dog-whistling to the assorted paranoid groups that the Republican Party now relies on as their base.
This conspiracy mongering is nothing new for Trump or Fox News. Having begun the descent in 2008 and Barack Obama’s election, the pairing has consistently questioned everything from Obama’s birthplace to whether he is the leader of an anti-American cabal obsessed with bringing the empire to its knees. Fox has continually peddled one story after another angling to paint Obama as a traitor and a danger to America, while Trump has done everything from calling him “dumb,” “weak,” and “the founder of ISIS.”
Of course, Birtherism was a conspiracy born of white supremacy, racial paranoia, and the troubling American past of identity and citizenship. The other charges are offshoots of the New World Order conspiracy theory that posits that white Christian America is under attack from shadowy, satanic operatives outside the country working with traitors within.
Obamagate, like the Deep State and Qanon narratives, is intended to pluck all of these different wires at once, presenting a mythical vision of an America that is unbeatable, indestructible, great, if you will, and perfect. An empire that has God’s favor at all times and only falters when elements within the country, whether traitors or “weak” individuals betraying God’s will, undermine the final goal.
Now, in the midst of a generational pandemic and an economic crisis rivaling the Great Depression, Obamagate is meant to achieve multiple goals. First, it changes the story from the coronavirus to a constructed narrative meant to short-circuit television news coverage, entice spectacle-addicted viewers, draw in networks determined to seem fair and balanced, and give supporters a one-word explanation for why their president has failed so spectacularly. Second, it draws Joe Biden, Trump’s opponent in the November election, into a complex and disgusting web of charges that could hurt his electoral chances while supplying a damning narrative to the media covering him, ala Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016. And finally, Obamagate activates the myth of American exceptionalism, making the case that we have faltered in the face of this test not because Donald Trump has failed to lead, but because elements within the country are acting against the national interest.
Soon, Fox and Trump will escalate their plan to blame China and insinuate the coronavirus was a biological weapon. We’ve already seen Trump infer that his media critics and Democratic rivals are in league with China. They will push this dangerous conspiracy theory as far as they can, possibly bringing Obama and Biden and anyone else fitting their designs into the public for show trials or public spectacles. The summer and early fall, as the numbers of the dead continue piling up, could be an ugly moment in American history as this scorched earth strategy unfurls.
Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. Currently he serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.
