It’s hard to keep up with the Left in its endless pursuit of Donald Trump’s (a) impeachment, (b) exile, (c) removal for mental incapacity, or (d) all of the above. The rationale that underlies these solutions are as varied as the solutions themselves. One day it’s because he colluded with the Russians, the next because his tweets are mean-spirited and unbecoming the presidency.
In an op-ed published Thursday, The New York Times’s redoubtable Charles Blow invents a whole narrative for why liberals should despise Trump.
The first two paragraphs lay the groundwork for Blow’s premise, but they ultimately reveal more about the author than they do about his subject:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Donald Trump has a thing about Barack Obama. Trump is obsessed with Obama. Obama haunts Trump’s dreams. One of Trump’s primary motivators is the absolute erasure of Obama — were it possible — not only from the political landscape but also from the history books.
Trump is president because of Obama, or more precisely, because of his hostility to Obama. Trump came onto the political scene by attacking Obama.
The first paragraph alone is a goldmine. In it Blow accuses Trump of wanting to erase Barack Obama from the history books, ignoring entirely that Obama’s eight years of stagnation by themselves guarantee that his chapter in the history books will be exceedingly brief. His one signature legislative achievement (if achievement is the right word) is all but dead under its own weight, and much of his forays into social engineering have been overturned halfway through Trump’s first year in office. Beyond that, about the only thing worth mentioning about Obama is that he broke the presidential color barrier. That claim to fame takes a half dozen words.
In suggesting that “Trump is obsessed with Obama,” Blow is conveniently overlooking the president with whom Obama was obsessed. He mentioned George W. Bush and the “mess” he “inherited” almost daily. Obama’s fixation on his predecessor was so intense that it became a running gag among his many critics.
In the opening sentence of the second paragraph, Blow is half-right. It is true that “Trump is president because of Obama.” But it’s not “because of his hostility to Obama.” It’s because Obama misread his election as a mandate to “fundamentally change the United States of America” into a social democracy — a plan that was applauded by a handful of radical-left pols and journalists, like Blow himself. American voters showed their distaste for Obama’s grand vision as early as 2010, when they returned the House of Representatives to GOP control, and in 2014 when they restored the Senate to the Republicans. By the election of 2016, voters made the transfer of power complete.
Heedless of any of this, Blow continues his assault, hammering Trump for questioning Obama’s birthplace and “his academic and literary pedigree.” But many people questioned Obama’s birthplace, and with good reason, because of the many details of his earlier life that he chose to remain close-mouthed about. These include his years in Indonesia, during which he attended school at an Islamic madrassa, where he was enrolled, moreover, as Barry Soetoro. As for Obama’s “literary pedigree,” there are unanswered questions looming to this day about whether Obama had help writing his two autobiographies. From Quora:
The evidence is very strong that Obama did benefit from a “ghost writer” in the creation of Dreams from My Father. For example, the author Christoper Andersen indicates in Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage that it was Michelle’s idea for Obama to turn to Bill Ayers for assistance in finishing his first book. (See, p. 164.) Andersen writes: “Two months later, with a September 1994 deadline looming, Barack was still stymied. It was around this time that, at Michell’s urging, he sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers. Michelle had known Ayers’s wife, Bernadine Dohrn, at Sidley Austin, where Dohrn worked as a paralegal between 1984 and 1988. Dohrn’s father-in-law, former Commonwealth Edison CEO Thomas Ayers, just happended to be one of the firm’s most important clients.” Andersen is a liberal with immpecable credentials as a journalist. His reporting on the role of Bill Ayers in Barack Obama’s authorship of Dreams from My Fatherprovides a powerful, independent confirmation of Jack Cashill’s thesis in Deconstructing Obama. Ironically, Bill Ayers does not deny ghost writing Dreams from My Father and instead seems to enjoy calling attention to his role.
None of this of course matters to Blow or his ilk, who over the years fostered their own counter-conspiracy that Ayers was joking when confessed having written some of Obama’s material.
Further on in his combination hit piece/panegyric, Blow goes off the deep end, writing:
The whole world seemed to love Obama — and by extension, held America in high regard — but the world loathes Trump.
There’s more beyond this, but you can save yourself the trouble of having to trudge through it. You’ll find it pretty heavy-handed unless, like Blow, your adoration of Obama is as out of touch with reality as your hatred for Trump.
