About a month ago, drowning in a sea of crises, Donald Trump accused Barack Obama of unspecified crimes, clinging to what he would dub “Obamagate” like a life raft. It didn’t quite work, not least because he couldn’t even describe what it was his predecessor had supposedly done. “You know what the crime is,” Trump said in May, pressed by reporters to say what laws Obama had broken. “The crime is very obvious to everybody.” Now, it seems Trump has finally given it some thought. “It’s treason,” he said in a CBN News interview that aired on Monday night. “Look, when I came out a long time ago, I said they’ve been spying on my campaign. I said they’ve been taping, and that was in quotes, meaning a modern-day version of taping, it’s all the same thing. But a modern-day version. But they’ve been spying on my campaign.”
Of course, the claim that Obama spied on the Trump campaign is unfounded, no matter how many times the president has repeated it since he first leveled the accusations against his predecessor in 2017. But even if it were true that Barack Obama snuck into Trump Tower in 2016 to bug Trump’s office, that wouldn’t exactly be treason, defined by the Constitution as “levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
Semantics aside, the notion that some shadowy “deep state” cabal has, for close to half a decade now, been hellbent on undermining Trump is a fiction he has promoted since the early days of his presidency. His favorite piece of evidence in favor of this theory—text messages between former FBI agents Lisa Page and Peter Strzok—has become a fixture at his campaign rallies, with Trump playacting conversations between the two to uproarious encouragement from his fans. To that end, he has accused the Obama-era justice department of Treason—“[it] was a disgrace,” he said in May. “And they got caught. They got caught. Very dishonest people—but much more than dishonest. Treason, it’s treason.” But he’s never gone so far as to publicly pin the blame on Obama himself.
Whether Trump actually believes Obama was listening in on his phone calls is up for debate—his conspiracy-addled brain may certainly be up to the creative challenge. Either way, in suggesting members of the Obama administration committed crimes for which they should be “sent to jail for 50 years”—or, “if it were 100 years ago, or 50 years ago,” executed—he’s seemingly hoping to shift the focus away from a public health crisis that keeps getting worse, a conversation about race and policing that has put him out of step with a majority of Americans, and a flagging reelection campaign against Joe Biden.
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