Donald Trump has been sounding confused lately. He keeps talking about Barack Obama as if he were currently the president rather than having been out of office for more than six years. But this week, Trump has gotten more explicit about his theory of what’s going on—and surprise! It’s a conspiracy theory. In a Monday campaign event in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Trump said, “It’s never been worse than it is now under crooked Joe Biden and, frankly, his boss, Barack Hussein Obama. I think it’s his boss.”
At a Wednesday rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump went all in on that claim:
Instead of keeping terrorists and terrorist sympathizers out of America, the Biden administration is inviting them in. You know why? Because he’s got a boss. Who’s his boss? Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Hussein. Barack Hussein Obama. Remember the great Rush Limbaugh? Barack HUSSEIN Obama. He’d go ‘Barack HUSSEIN Obama.’
Gee, Donald, say “Hussein” again. I don’t think we got it the first five times.
NBC News tied Trump’s Monday remarks to a pre-existing right-wing conspiracy theory that draws on a joking comment Obama made to Stephen Colbert in 2020: “People would ask me, knowing what you know now, do you wish you’d had a third term, and I used to say, ‘If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front-man or front-woman and they had an earpiece in and I was just in my basement in my sweats, looking through the stuff and then I could sort of deliver the lines but someone else was doing all the talking and the ceremony, I’d be fine with that.’” Ben Shapiro reportedly kicked off a round of right-wing media just asking questions about it over the summer, and now it’s made its way to Trump asserting repeatedly that Obama is Biden’s boss.
One of the challenges Trump faces with Biden is that Biden is such a standard-issue white man, exactly the kind of person most Americans have been accustomed to seeing in positions of power. It’s hard to play on the racism and misogyny that are Trump’s political bread and butter when Biden is the political opponent. He and other Republicans have to pretend that Biden isn’t really the one in charge, although apparently they can’t quite decide if the person pulling the strings is Obama or Vice President Kamala Harris.
As a nice little postscript, Trump added, “Unbelievably, the corrupt Department of Justice just invited an Iranian-backed judge from Iraq to visit our nation’s capital. Ain’t that nice? He couldn’t have been too impressed with our capital, it looks like shit.” This is just the latest in a string of Trump attacks on Washington, D.C., although if he had been talking about the U.S. Capitol, there was a day it looked like shit—thanks to Trump and his supporters. Maybe he’s been looking at pictures of that day and enjoying them a little too much.
