A few weeks ago, CNN posted a story that desperately and mistakenly tried to create the impression that Donald Trump and Barack Obama share roughly equal blame for their poor relationship. As we tried to show in this article, the idea that Barack Obama has anything resembling the culpability of Donald Trump in damaging relations between the two men is an utter joke. A fair reading of the facts demonstrates that Trump has been the instigator of bad feelings between the two, beginning with Trump’s accusations years ago that President Obama lacked a birth certificate and wasn’t an American citizen.
Now CNN is out with a new article on the same theme, revisiting many of the original piece's false assumptions. Perhaps it’s just the passage of time, but the offensiveness of the bizarre attempt at balance is even more striking to The Hot Screen this time around, and we’ve got a few ideas why.
As in the first article, this fresh CNN piece speaks in terms of a two-way fight between the former and current president, terming it “the nastiest public dispute in modern presidential history.” Though it does acknowledge that “the acrimony is largely one-sided” — a point well supported by the evidence it presents - the article’s frame of a “dispute” or a bad “relationship” is a misleading perspective on the facts. Of course it is true the two men don’t get along. But the far bigger story is that Donald Trump, as president, has at this point accused his predecessor of various crimes, including illegal spying (in the form of alleged surveillance of the Trump campaign), collusion with the Russians, and obstruction of justice (these latter two via a tweet just this week). To say they are in a "dispute" at this point is like writing about a robbery exclusively in terms of the ensuing “really bad relationship” between the victim and assailant — talk about burying the lead!
Saying that Trump and Obama have a bad relationship suggests a parity between the men, but the fact that one man is the current president and is using his power and prestige to accuse his predecessor of crimes is hugely relevant to describing what is going on here — what is, in fact, the far more important news. This fact makes a world of difference in terms of their power differential, and more importantly, the implications of one's animosity toward the other. To speak of a sort of tit-for-tat between the two men serves to obscure the shocking and vitally important fact that, for the first time in modern memory, a president is seeking without evidence to criminalize his predecessor.
As we've stated before, we believe that if and when articles of impeachment are drawn up against President Trump, they need to include his dangerous slander against Barack Obama, for the inciting effects it has on his supporters and the potential destabilization it carries for the peaceful transfer of power in our country. We can't allow Trump to normalize the idea that a new president can use the power of his office to falsely accuse his predecessor of criminal behavior: this is the gateway to a state of affairs where the justice system is used as a political weapon, as it is in many an authoritarian regime and banana republic.
