The second theory, that the “treason” chatter is a contrived distraction, is so plainly true that it barely warrants comment. Not only has Trump begun to deflect questions about Epstein by pivoting to Obama’s “coup,” he’s publicly encouraged other Republicans to do the same.
The president’s supporters want to see what the Justice Department has on Epstein, but for obvious reasons, Trump doesn’t want to show it to them. So he’s offering them a different scalp in hopes of appeasing them: Instead of getting to call Democrats perverted child-molesting freaks, they get to call Barack Obama a traitor.
The third theory, that the former president and his team actually engaged in a treasonous conspiracy, is silly.
The ‘hoax’ hoax.
To see why, read Mike Warren. Or Cathy Young. Or Eli Lake, a longtime critic of how the Obama-era FBI handled “Russiagate.” Or Ned Price, a former Obama intelligence official whose debunking of Gabbard’s allegations was published by, of all places, FoxNews.com.
Gabbard claims that the Obama administration conspired to mislead the public into believing that Russia hacked U.S. voting machines in 2016 to throw the election to Trump. But it didn’t. In fact, it explicitly rejected that theory. What the Obama White House alleged is that Russia hacked email accounts belonging to John Podesta and figures at the Democratic National Committee and published the contents through WikiLeaks to damage Hillary Clinton.
Team Obama also accused the Russians of using social media and propaganda outlets to try to influence American opinion about the candidates, a finding affirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 following its own investigation into the matter. “We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling,” declared, er, Marco Rubio, the committee chairman at the time.
Trump himself seems not to understand the particulars of what Gabbard is alleging, probably because he doesn’t care. In his haste to change the subject from Epstein, he’s blindly latched onto the idea that Obama “cheated” in the 2016 election and led a “coup.” A coup that ended with … Trump winning the presidency and being welcomed to the White House by Obama?
We had an actual presidential coup attempt four years later, you might recall, and there were no warm wishes in the Oval Office for the victor in that case. In reality, Obama and his deputies were so nervous about being seen as interfering in the 2016 election that they refrained from retaliating against Russia for its meddling until after the votes were cast.
And so, almost certainly, nothing will come from Tulsi Gabbard’s Two Minutes Hate apart from an uptick in death threats against the principals. Attorney General Pam Bondi has dutifully organized a “strike force” [eyeroll] to investigate the matter, but it’s unlikely to send any of Obama’s deputies to prison—and assuredly won’t send Obama himself there.
That’s because presidents are now immune from prosecution for crimes they commit in the course of exercising their “core constitutional powers,” which presumably includes Obama’s supervision of U.S. intelligence in 2016. You might think Donald Trump, the chief beneficiary of that doctrine, would understand that, but Trump has always viewed law as a form of political leverage to help one’s friends and hurt one’s enemies. Perhaps he assumes, mistakenly, that his “friends” among the Supreme Court’s conservative majority won’t grant the same presidential immunity to a hated Democrat like Obama that they granted to Trump himself.
Regardless, Barack Obama isn’t going to the Big House. The possibility is so remote that some of the president’s own allies have begun trying to tamp down the expectations he’s inflated on the right before another Epstein-esque “great disappointment” occurs.
That’s why FoxNews.com chose to publish Price’s piece, I take it, and why Ted Cruz and Laura Ingraham spent a few minutes on Fox News this week scoffing at the idea of putting Obama on trial. Republicans are starting to worry that the president’s new shiny object about “Russiagate” might succeed too well in distracting populists, amping them up about another sinister conspiracy that again somehow doesn’t lead to mass arrests. Bad enough that Trump would decline to pursue the cabal of elite liberal pedophiles around Epstein; now, supposedly, he has proof in hand of “treason” by their least favorite Democrat, and he’s not prosecuting that either.
How many disappointments is MAGA willing to endure before it gets indignant about being played for suckers by its hero?
Fundamentalist MAGA.
After 10 years of observing the right’s utter civic perversion, my considered answer is “as many as Trump asks them to endure.”
That’s why I doubt that the Epstein cover-up will do Trump any real long-term damage. His supporters have made too many moral compromises in the pursuit of power to blow it now by undercutting him halfway through the first year of his second term. They’ll tell themselves what they need to tell themselves to make peace with letting Barack Obama and the Illuminati pedo ring off the hook.
In fact, the waters are already being tested by populist propagandists to see if viewers are open to rehabilitating Ghislaine Maxwell as a political martyr. They, and we, know what’s coming; when it does, Trump and his servants will need Republicans to greet it as an act of mercy and justice rather than one of the most corrupt bargains in American history.
The postliberal rank-and-file will reconcile themselves to the president’s political needs so long as he leads their movement. His agenda is their agenda. But that’s not necessarily true of more prominent postliberals, who have their own independent followings (to some degree) and their own ideas about what the agenda for a post-Trump right should be.
For people like that, a second “great disappointment” in failing to prosecute Obama will be a black mark on the president’s legacy that they can and will exploit to try to shape his movement once he’s gone. And so they’re putting him on notice: It’s time to put up or shut up.
“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene warned on Monday. “If not … the base will turn and there’s no going back.”
Trump “accused his predecessor as commander-in-chief of treason—in front of another head of state and live on global TV. This unprecedented move makes the follow-through vitally important,” Steve Bannon told Axios. “The accused must be indicted, must be prosecuted, must be incarcerated when found guilty. The failure to leave it all on the field after DNI’s and the president’s charges would be devastating to the MAGA movement and the nation.”
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh ranted on the same theme during his podcast on Monday:
The typical pattern by Republicans since forever is to make these kinds of claims, but to make them only on social media and Fox News and to never actually bring it to a court of law so the parties responsible can be held accountable for their crimes.
And I’m tired of it. I’m sick to death of it. Go arrest these people and bring them to justice. Funny memes and outraged soundbites on Fox News are not going to cut it anymore. Go make an arrest. Put somebody in prison.
…
In fact, I’ll say this. The consequences of these allegations from Tulsi must be one of two things—either top Obama officials are arrested or Tulsi Gabbard should be fired.
You can sense in Walsh’s tone the exasperation that all MAGA “influencers” must be feeling after being hung out to dry on Epstein. They spent years hyping the DOJ’s files to their audiences only to have Trump suddenly demand that they join him in discrediting the documents as a “deep state” hoax. Now they’re caught between loyalty to a paranoid base and loyalty to a demagogic president, and they resent it.
That includes one of Trump’s own appointees. According to the Wall Street Journal, Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino “has told colleagues that his association with the administration’s decision to keep the files private has eroded his credibility among the base of support that fueled his rise as a successful podcaster and media personality on the right.” Even the second-highest-ranking cop in the federal government worries about not telling his right-wing audience what it wants to hear.
But there’s also a strategic component to the calls to prosecute Obama by Walsh and his ilk.
Once Trump leaves politics, there will be a free-for-all in which various right-ish factions rush to fill the immense power vacuum left behind, forcing each to offer a (very delicately phrased) critique of his failures. Traditional conservatives will try to stage a comeback by accusing him of being too profligate with spending and too protectionist on trade. Economic populists, possibly led by J.D. Vance, will argue that fulfilling the promise of “America First” requires reforming the welfare state to serve families above all others.
And then there’s what I’ve been calling “fundamentalist MAGA,” the ardent postliberals who believe there’s no problem with postliberalism that more extreme postliberalism can’t solve. They’ll argue that Trump’s core failure was not jailing enough political opponents. Never mind that his imperious tariffs are turning Americans into free-traders and his draconian immigration policies are turning them into amnesty fans: This group understands that the path to getting ahead in modern right-wing politics always runs through greater ruthlessness.
What we’re seeing in the “put up or shut up” gripes about the Epstein files and now about prosecuting the Obama administration, I think, is fundamentalist MAGA pre-positioning itself to call Trump a wimp once it becomes politically safe to do so. They’re not accusing him of overselling the case against Obama, to be clear—Walsh went on to say that he believes Gabbard—but of promising ruthlessness and then not delivering. His sin is a failure of resolve, not of deceiving his fans.
What will the president do about this?
Frivolity.
I think he’s going to end up prosecuting someone frivolously. Not Obama himself, perhaps, but probably one of his deputies.
Rand Paul has already proposed testing the lawfulness of Joe Biden’s “autopen” pardons by indicting Anthony Fauci, a recipient of one of those pardons, on perjury charges. “You can argue until you’re blue in the face that you can’t do autopens and that maybe the president wasn’t aware of it,” he said recently in an interview. “But the only way to actually do this is to charge someone who has been pardoned.”
That’s in line with fundamentalist MAGA’s grumbling about Epstein and Obama. Why not at least try to prosecute someone? If the courts throw it out, so be it. But what’s the excuse for not trying? Put it in front of a grand jury and see what happens.
“It’s unethical for prosecutors to charge someone unless they believe in good faith that a crime has occurred,” you might say. To which I would say: Just listen to yourself.
We’re on the brink of Jeffrey Epstein’s pimp being pardoned in return for clearing the president of complicity in his crimes. Ethical considerations aren’t stopping anyone from doing anything in this administration.
There’s no political downside for Trump or Bondi in trying to prosecute Obama and/or one of his deputies. Most of the public will hate it, we might presume, but the president has always understood that keeping his base thrilled is enough to guarantee a respectable-ish approval rating in the low or mid-40s. The base is annoyed with him at the moment; moving against the Obama administration would rally them behind him.
The prosecutions would likely fail to produce any convictions, but for Trump, that would still be preferable to the status quo. If and when Obama and his alumni walk free, he can shift the blame for their freedom to judges and juries. Bondi will still be a scapegoat for the populist right, forced to explain to angry dimwits why she couldn’t make bogus accusations against a former president stick, but at least she’ll have proved she’s willing to “fight.”
And if the courts go as far as to sanction her or her deputies at the DOJ for bringing frivolous prosecutions, she’ll still probably end up better off than she is now. I promise that the president can, and will, find lawyers in the department who are willing to risk their careers by abusing the machinery of justice to pursue his political vendettas. If Bondi ends up persona non grata in federal courtrooms because of it, Trump will reward her with a White House advisory role or an ambassadorship—or a seat on the federal bench, where the most loyal henchmen now end up.
Fundamentalist MAGA would be delighted to see Bondi fail to gain any convictions, I suspect, as that would bolster their case in 2028 and beyond that the right needs to get considerably more ruthless if it wants to make America great again. The “deep state” is wilier and more entrenched than we thought, they’ll say; an authoritarian strongman staffed by servile toadies wasn’t enough to dislodge it. Not until Republicans get serious about stocking the judiciary with fascists willing to hand the president dictatorial powers can national restoration happen.
The explicit premise of the postliberal experiment that Americans voted for last November is that the president will try to exact “retribution” on his enemies, and he won’t let little things like laws get in his way. In appointing figures like Bondi and Kash Patel, he gave himself the bureaucratic tools he needs to make that happen. Literally everything points to him eventually bringing trumped-up charges—no pun intended—against political nemeses purely to harass them. He’s going to do it sooner or later. Why not now?
