Trump's new obsession with an 'Obamagate' conspiracy is dangerous — and points to something sinister within

During the first few years of Donald Trump’s presidency, the president’s defenders frequently invoked a quote attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, the infamous Stalin-era Soviet Secret Police Chief, to describe the myriad investigations into him conducted by the Department of Justice, the House of Representatives, and the City and State of New York: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

Of course, unlike Beria’s targets, a series of investigations have revealed information about Trump’s conduct before and after assuming the presidency. that — but for his status as president — would almost certainly have resulted in a criminal case against him.

Many of Trump’s critics are also fond of drawing comparisons between the 45^th President of the United States and a host of history’s most infamous dictators, including but not limited to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and of course, Josef Stalin.

But those comparisons are unfair as well. Unlike Stalin (or Beria), Trump can’t even show us the crime.

In the five days since the Department of Justice filed a motion to drop the criminal case against retired Army General Michael Flynn — Trump’s first national security adviser — for lying to the FBI, the president has once again become fixated on what he describes as the “biggest political crime in American history”. This was somehow revealed by the Justice Department’s unprecedented decision to release FBI agents’ notes to Flynn’s attorneys, despite a judge’s order that such documents fell outside the category of “exculpatory” evidence that the state must turn over to a defendant.

Trump and his allies have also chosen to play up a series of transcripts of interviews conducted by the House Intelligence Committee during its investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. In particular, they’ve glommed onto a section of the committee’s interview with former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, in which she describes a meeting that took place in the Oval Office during the last days of the Obama administration, as particularly scandalous.

Yates told investigators that Barack Obama, then the sitting President of the United States, knew about a highly classified surveillance intercept of then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak’s phone call with Flynn, then Trump’s National Security Adviser-designate.

To Trump, who famously does not read his daily intelligence briefings, the idea that the president would be fully informed about the communications of a foreign adversary represents a scandal which he has named “Obamagate.”

Yet when The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker asked him to explain what crimes he believes his predecessor committed, he couldn’t, because he can’t, though a troika of Trump-appointed federal prosecutors are combing through records from the DOJ’s Trump-Russia investigation and the waning days of the Obama administration to find material that can be used in the same way FBI agents’ notes were used to undermine the Justice Department’s case against Flynn.

But what Trump calls “Obamagate,” the ongoing investigation into the Russia investigation, and the DOJ’s move to drop charges against Flynn are neither examples of the usual Trumpian bluster or projection against a political enemy. Nor are they yet another flagrant violation of longstanding norms governing the president’s relationship with the Justice Department.

It’s much worse than that.

Jason Stanley, a Yale University professor who studies authoritarianism and propaganda, posits that the endgame for Trumpworld is to bring many of the baseless conspiracy theories about Obama, Trump, and other prominent Democrats that fall under the umbrella of “QAnon” into real life.

“They are reverse-engineering reality to fit their crazy conspiracy theories,” he explained. “They're trying to find any possible story that they can tell by taking things out of context and fitting them into their conspiracy theory.”

Stanley said Trump’s manic tweeting about “Obamagate” and the Justice Department’s actions in the Flynn case are clear statements of their intentions.

“This is a known feature of authoritarian governments — they create the reality of their lies,” he said. “They're telling people the story that they're going to manufacture, and to reverse-engineer reality to make true their vision of it, and that will require cherry-picking things because reality is just not convenient … and any counter-evidence is just evidence that there was a conspiracy against them to begin with.”

“They're looking through all the documents for a few piece of pieces of data that they're gonna say are really the smoking gun, and then all the massive evidence against their conspiracy theory is all going to be discounted — in fact, it's going to be treated as evidence for the conspiracy theory, since it's supposedly written by the conspirators,” he continued, adding that Trump’s invocation of Obama’s name was a way to “racialize the 2020 election” by making it about his predecessor’s perceived corruption rather than his own record.

But Trump’s ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, said Trump’s claims about Obama arise not from any political calculation, but from a profoundly disordered mind.

“I think the underlying explanation is that he is he has the traits of a psychopath — he is unrestrained by a sense of any conscience,” Schwartz said. “If you don't have a conscience, you don't make a distinction between what's true and what's false. You invent reality … as you go to suit your immediate needs.”

“It's not material to him whether it's true or false. It’s: ‘Will I get over with this thing? Will this advance my interests?’ which are the only questions that he has ever asked.”

Schwartz is not the only person who knows the president to suggest that Trump suffers from such a personality disorder.

Attorney George Conway, who is also known as the husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, argued last year in The Atlantic that Trump suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and has more recently argued that he suffers from “malignant narcissisism.” Malignant narcissism is a term coined by social psychologist Erich Fromm, who described it as "severe mental sickness" representing "the quintessence of evil" and "the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity."

But one ex-White House official who asked to remain anonymous to protect their political consulting business said Trump’s embrace of conspiracy theories is not made out of calculation or rooted in some deeper lack of moral center, but because they bolster his self-esteem.

“He believes every word of this bulls**t because he’s a crackpot who wants to feel good about himself and the crackpots who talk about it make him feel good about himself by talking about it,” the former official said. “Now President Crackpot has other crackpots running investigations to support the crackpot theories he sees on Fox News and OAN. We’re living in a crackpotcracy.”