How Obama’s Trolling Created Trump

26 Sep, 2016 by Dave Blount

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“If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him” Sun Tzu advised. Obama may have taken this recommendation a step too far, in the process creating both the Trump candidacy and the constituency it represents.

Jonah Goldberg agrees that when it comes time to apportion blame for the unfolding Trump disaster, Obama deserves a share:

One of the central insights of both the Obama campaign and administration (the difference is subtle but real) is that Obama benefits when his critics overreact. In 2008, then-political adviser David Axelrod coined the phrase “no drama Obama” to describe not only his client’s personality but his messaging. By seeming unflappable in the face of criticism, Obama comes across as presidential. The more heated the criticism, the more presidential he seems.

The thing is, Obama often intentionally provokes the conservative base. As the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman put it in January 2015, Obama “seems to come up with a new idea every couple of weeks to drive [the GOP] up a wall.” That makes him a master at trolling.

For example,

In late 2014, when Obama announced that he was going to unilaterally block the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants in the country — after insisting for years that the Constitution wouldn’t allow him to do anything of the sort — many writers on the left and the right recognized that at least part of his strategy was to bait Republicans. Obama could have changed the policy quietly, without much fanfare. Instead, he sought to incite as much right-wing anger as possible.

Tellingly, the White House didn’t give the exclusive to Univision or MSNBC, but to Fox News. As liberal writer Bill Scher put it in Politico, “Operation Epic Troll” was a “smashing success.”

Obama’s reluctance to clear up the birther issue is another example:

He could have released his birth certificate as early as 2008, when the Mephistophelean Clinton henchman Sid Blumenthal was whispering in reporters’ ears. But Obama didn’t for years — in part because he knew the conspiracy theory would galvanize his base. It not only confirmed everything liberals wanted to hear about the Right, it also provided Obama with an endless supply of one-liners. And for a long time that worked well for Obama; he got to mock birthers and play the dignified victim.

You can probably already see the problem. When you throw out so many buckets of chum, you have no idea what kinds of creatures you’ll attract.

Obama chummed the waters for so long, he pulled in a great white shark.

That great white was a very small man with a Jaws-sized ego, a former Obama supporter turned birther who decided to run for President the night Obama mocked him at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011, according to a Frontline special:

Omarosa [Manigault, a prominent contestant on Trump’s reality show] and [unsavory Trump henchman] Roger Stone were both interviewed for the special, and Omarosa recalled how while watching Obama “hammering” Trump, she thought, “Oh, Barack Obama is starting something that I don’t know if he’ll be able to finish.”

Omarosa sums up why a guy with no coherent political philosophy to advance would want to be President:

“Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump. It’s everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, who ever disagreed, who ever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.”

Watch Obama trolling Trump in this excerpt from the special.

The pathologically insecure Trump has no sense of humor when it comes to his own ego, which is as massive, fragile, and combustible as the Hindenburg. Instead of laughing off his roasting like a normal person would do, he became a man on a mission to avenge it.

Similarly, his supporters have been driven insane with anger by Obama’s smug, smirking destruction and desecration of everything they hold dear. Only blind rage could explain backing such a patently unfit candidate rather than a legitimate conservative.

Obama’s presidency has been a finger deliberately poked in the eye of regular Americans. Trump’s candidacy is a finger poked in the eye in response. America will be left with two bloody holes where its eyes used to be.

On a tip from Varla. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.