The U.S. is on track to hit 100,000 deaths from coronavirus by the end of May, with over 1.5 million cases and 90,000 dead already, and basic preventative and protective measures proven to work in dozens of other nations have been conscripted as partisan signals in a bizarre culture war. Even the normally guarded former president Barack Obama has made some relatively mild public comments about how poorly the Trump administration has handled the crisis. So naturally, President Trump has gone back to his political roots and started making loud noises about a non-existent scandal narrative he clearly doesn’t even understand himself and cannot explain.
“Stop trying to make Obamagate happen, it’s not a thing,” says Seth Meyers in the clip above. “Just because the president makes up a word, doesn’t mean we all have to take it seriously. Every day Trump just tweets the word ‘OBAMAGATE!’ in all-caps — there’s a good chance it’s his Twitter password and he doesn’t realise he’s already logged in.”
This is, as Meyers notes, just Trump returning to the territory that launched his presidential ambitions in the first place: playing on the sentiment within his base that there’s just something shady about the nation’s first black president in order to stoke paranoia and avoid actually saying or doing anything real.
“The president is just deeply incapable of and uninterested in doing his job,” Meyers sums up. “He clearly wishes he could just pretend the coronavirus pandemic was over, and to distract from this he’s peddling a made-up scandal about his predecessor that even he can’t explain.”