Trump's Wildly Fascistic Posting Spree Isn't Just a Distraction From Epstein
Trump's fascistic fantasies about making his enemies — from Democratic lawmakers to late-night hosts — suffer aren't just a distraction, though. They're part of the very real authoritarian project he and his administration have been actively carrying out for the past six months, and that they appear determined to continue carrying out through the rest of his time in office.
The video of federal agents dragging Obama away, which appears to have been generated with AI, is set to the tune of the Village People's 'Y.M.C.A.' and opens with a compilation of clips showing Democratic officials and lawmakers — including Obama, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and former President Joe Biden — saying the phrase 'no one is above the law.' The video then cuts to an AI-generated clip of Trump and Obama sitting in the Oval Office, where FBI agents enter, force Obama to his knees, handcuff and arrest him as Trump grins. The video ends with another AI-generated clip of the former president sitting in a jail cell, clad in an orange jumpsuit.
Trump has been fuming for days now over accusations raised by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that Obama and high-level officials from his administration engaged in a 'treasonous conspiracy in 2016' against Trump. Gabbard accused the Obama administration of having 'manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a yearslong coup against President Trump,' related to 2016 Russian election interference efforts.
Trump on Sunday also shared an AI-generated video — from an account credited as 'DeepFakeQuotes' — of a man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask telling viewers that 'this is not a conspiracy theory, this is not speculation, this is documented fact.' The video's split screen features a headline highlighting Gabbard's suggestion that Obama and other officials should be prosecuted over their supposed participation in the alleged scheme.
Keeping with the theme of prosecuting his political rivals, Trump also posted a photo grid in the style of The Brady Bunch's opening credits ('The Shady Bunch,' read the center square) that featured several prominent Obama-era Democrats in orange jumpsuits, holding up police placards as if posing for mug shots. Obama, former United Nations Ambassadors Samantha Power and Susan Rice, former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, former FBI Director James Comey, and former CIA Director John Brennan were depicted in the image.
Another AI-generated image the president shared depicted what were presumably handcuffed lawmakers being marched in front of the Capitol with the caption 'UNTIL THIS HAPPENS NOTHING CHANGES.' He also wrote on Sunday that Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the president's longtime targets whom he recently accused of mortgage fraud, should 'pay the price of prison for a real crime, not one made up by the corrupt accusers!'
Lest anyone forget that the president is a 79-year-old addicted to his personal social media platform, Trump took a brief detour in his posting journey to share a 'top-25' compilation of dated viral videos, set to stock rock music. It was a bizarre palate cleanser amid the barrage of authoritarian AI slop.
In one sense, Trump appears to be trying to divert attention from the weekslong fallout from his administration's decision to bury files related to the Epstein investigation — a subject that has threatened to tear apart sections of the highest levels of the federal government and that has been so aggravating to the president that he has personally managed efforts to quell the 'MAGA rebellion' debacle. Trump seems desperate to return the national conversation to his openly fascistic plans for punishing his political enemies based on bogus narratives, while commanding every major private industry to do exactly what he wants.
Trump actually getting everything he wants — for instance, Obama in a jumpsuit — is at best a long shot, particularly in light of the Supreme Court's presidential immunity decision that has greatly behooved Trump. Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss his reminders, on Truth Social and elsewhere, of his administration's authoritarian schemes as mere distractions from Epstein. This is largely because his administration has already proved it is willing to pursue the kinds of fascistic fantasies he has been teasing on Truth Social.
In his online rage-posting spree over the weekend, Trump commanded multiple professional sports teams to make their names racist again. He did this after six months of showing that he's more than willing to corruptly wield the federal government to make private entities' lives miserable if they don't do exactly what he wants them to do.
Late last week, Trump cattily celebrated CBS' cancellation of The Late Show, hosted by frequent Trump critic and comedian Stephen Colbert. The network's move came against the backdrop of parent company Paramount working to consummate its multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance — a merger that Trump and his government have made clear they could crush whenever they feel like it. 'I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,' Trump posted on Friday. 'I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.'
His dig at Kimmel, who hosts a late-night show on ABC isn't just a distraction, either. Multiple senior Trump administration officials have told Rolling Stone for months that the president is very serious — and has spoken to them repeatedly — about ideas for using government and FCC leverage against major companies in order to retaliate or even silence his nemeses in late-night comedy. In his first term in the White House, Trump wanted his Justice Department to go after NBC's Saturday Night Live and other programs that pissed him off, and he instructed his White House staff to pressure Disney to censor Kimmel, also a frequent Trump critic. Neither of those things worked, in part because some of his senior officials simply waited until he got bored and moved on. In his second term, he is almost entirely surrounded by lieutenants who want to help him get as close to achieving his authoritarian fantasies as possible.
Indeed, several of the current senior Trump officials say the president and his team feel 'emboldened' by how many major corporate entities and other private organizations have bent the knee in recent months, with one Trump adviser saying the 'pounds of flesh' Team Trump has extracted already from places like Paramount Global and CBS are significantly more than they were expecting going into this second Trump era.
The lesson this president and his top appointees are learning is that they can, in fact, get away with it, and that it can only benefit their autocratic cause to push the envelope further. And that is just as true during the weeks when Trump doesn't want you to talk about his former friend Jeffrey Epstein.
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