Washington Post columnist Molly Roberts captured the reason that President Donald Trump doesn't want to "define" what actual crime is contained in what he calls Obamagate.
During a press conference, The Post's Phil Rucker asked the president to define what exactly Obamagate was. The president attacked the question saying that everyone knows it and if his paper was any good they'd write about it. But it isn't just reporters who have no idea what conspiracy du jour the president has decided to run with. His supporters don't even know what Obamagate is.
Some believe it's about Michel Flynn, others believe it's about the Russia scandal. A Twitter search of the hashtag reveals that a huge number of the people just seem to blindly tweet that the scandal is huge, still without even defining what the crime was.
"What Obamagate is, in fact, is a series of allegations ranging from ludicrous to plausible," explained Roberts. "Shortly into his tenure, Trump tweeted that Barack Obama 'had my ‘wires tapped’' in the fall. The years that have followed have been a frantic and fabulous romp through the right-wing fever swamps in search of evidence that doesn’t exist — or, as a fallback, hints of lesser nefarity from a previous administration determined to hamstring its successors."
The Flynn scandal just died an embarrassing death when it was revealed Wednesday that Flynn's name was never "masked" to begin with, so there couldn't be an "unmasking" or a leaking of Flynn's name.
"Here’s the catch, though: The moment you refute the tinfoil-hatted crusaders by explaining what unmasking really is, or by noting that a lie is a lie is a lie, Obamagate mutates into some other allegation or theory entirely. This is what it was born to do — it’s right there in the name," she explained.
"The more establishment-oriented have the opposite problem: Obamagate in its most popular form today doesn’t make sense," wrote Roberts. "See, for example, conservative commentator Andrew McCarthy’s close reading of a recently declassified email from Susan Rice. He doesn’t exactly cast the memo as confirmation of an overarching leftist plot like some of his kookier ideological allies; instead, he crafts a more complicated argument about political operatives trying to blame James B. Comey for their own questionable decisions."
In the end, the crime isn't obvious to anyone -- but Roberts alleged that Trump probably prefers it remains that way.
