Martin Gurri writes for the New York Post about the failed attempt to discredit President Donald Trump as he started his first presidential term eight years ago.
One possibility is that Obama and his people believed their own lies. They really thought Trump was a Russian operative, inserted into the Oval Office so he could destroy the country following the script of the 1962 movie, “The Manchurian Candidate.”
That’s unlikely, for a couple of reasons. If President Obama truly imagined Trump to be a foreign agent, he had every incentive to raise the alarm — not in an obscure intelligence report, but in public, before a national audience.
More to the point, when it came to American politics, Obama was a cold and calculating realist. He knew perfectly well when he was shading the truth to obtain a political advantage.
As the bizarre drafting process of the ICA demonstrates, the same was true of top bureaucrats like Brennan and Comey.
Everyone in this affair knew exactly what they were doing.
My take is that the attempted smearing of Trump was literally a vanity project for Obama, a man with an exalted view of himself, his personal achievements and his place in history.
His followers — a set that included pretty much all institutional elites — worshipped him.
From the idealist perspective, he was seen as the embodiment of hope and change, humane policymaking and smart diplomacy.
From a political angle, he was thought to be, like Franklin Roosevelt, a “transformational” figure, as the coalition he assembled of college-educated, minority, and young voters would provide a permanent Democratic Party majority for decades, if not forever.
That was the realistic position as the 2016 elections approached. It would take a man with a prodigious capacity for self-criticism not to believe such a flattering appraisal — and Obama, to put it mildly, was not that man.
Trump’s victory in 2016 shattered all of these illusions.
Suddenly, Obama was no longer a political messiah ushering in a liberal golden age. He was a helpless failure and an object of repudiation.
