Asked last week to define what he meant by “Obamagate”—a broad charge of conspiracy and alleged crime the president has recently lobbed at former President Barack Obama—President Donald Trump didn’t even bother trying to explain its origins. “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody,” he told reporters.
It’s not. Yet the made-up phrase “Obamagate,” which broadly seems to allege that Obama and then FBI director James Comey tried to sabotage Trump from the beginning, has done little to slow the proliferation of the term, as Seth Meyers noted on Monday night.
“Stop trying to make ‘Obamagate’ happen. It’s not a thing,” Meyers said during the latest installment of A Closer Look on Late Night. “Just because the president makes up a word doesn’t mean we all have to take it seriously. Every day Trump just tweets ‘Obamagate’ in all-caps. There’s a good chance it’s his Twitter password, and he doesn’t realize he’s already logged in.”
Trump’s attacks on Obama have become part of an apparent attempt by his administration and conservative media to divert attention from the government’s poor response to the coronavirus. The tactic has worked, insofar as major news networks have now begun to cover “Obamagate” with some frequency.
“The president is just deeply incapable of and uninterested in doing his job,” Meyers added on Monday. “He clearly wishes he could just pretend the coronavirus pandemic was over, and to distract from it, he’s just peddling a made-up scandal about his predecessor that even he can’t explain. That’s Trump’s one skill: his ability to exploit the media’s weaknesses.”
Obama himself, of course, has stayed above the scandal fray. But the former president did make a rare public statement against Trump this weekend, albeit without mentioning his successor by name. During a virtual commencement speech on Saturday, Obama slammed unnamed leaders who have allowed their most base instincts to guide them during the health crisis.
“Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy—that’s how little kids think,” Obama said. “Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grownups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still feel that way. Which is why things are so screwed up.”
“It’s both revealing and depressing that when Obama talks about grownups behaving like little children, we all know exactly who he’s talking about. There’s no mystery,” Meyers said in response.