
Trump posts AI video of Obama being arrested after Gabbard's coup claims: ‘No one is above the law'
Trump, still mired in controversy over his administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, posted the TikTok clip on his Truth Social platform on Sunday in which the Democrat is seen declaring in a rally speech that 'no one is above the law.'
He is then seen being handcuffed by law enforcement during an Oval Office sitdown with a grinning Trump, created using real footage of the two men meeting at the White House in November 2016 when the Republican was president-elect and Obama about to leave office.
The Democrat is then led away and subsequently seen wearing an orange jumpsuit in a federal prison, all of which is soundtracked by The Village People's 1970s disco anthem 'YMCA,' which has become the Republican's personal theme tune.
Trump appears to have been responding to comments made by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who appeared on Maria Bartiromo 's Fox News show Sunday Morning Futures over the weekend and accused Obama of orchestrating a 'years-long coup' to keep Trump from the White House.
Gabbard had announced on Friday that she was referring Obama administration officials, including ex-FBI director James Comey and her predecessor James Clapper, to the Justice Department for prosecution over allegations they had 'manufactured' intelligence to substantiate the idea that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump beat Hillary Clinton.
The president posted about Gabbard's claim 17 times over the weekend, drawing accusations that he was attempting to shift the national conversation away from his past relationship with Epstein, the billionaire pedophile and sex trafficker who died in jail in August 2019.
Trump's administration caused uproar two weeks ago by announcing that no Epstein 'client list' existed and that the financier had died by his own hand in a New York penitentiary, a verdict that incensed the president's own supporters demanding justice for Epstein's victims and punishment for his enablers.
Speaking to Bartiromo about the Obama administration on Sunday, Gabbard alleged: 'Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the president from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people.'
Her claims have been attacked as baseless by Democrats, among them Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who called her announcement 'one more example of the director of national intelligence trying to cook the books.'
'It is sadly not surprising that DNI Gabbard, who promised to depoliticize the intelligence community, is once again weaponizing her position to amplify the president's election conspiracy theories,' Warner wrote on X.
'It is appalling to hear DNI Gabbard accuse her own IC workforce of committing a 'treasonous conspiracy' when she was unwilling to label Edward Snowden a traitor.'
Obama has yet to respond to Trump's taunts but the president, himself a convicted felon, has kept at it on Truth Social, also posting mocked-up prison mugshots of Obama cabinet members and a call for California Democrat Sen. Adam Schiff to be arrested.
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A 4 March 2017 rally, billed as 'March 4 Trump', was a response to a planned protest against a campus speech by the rightwing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, then an alt-right darling but who would soon fall from grace after appearing to relativize pedophilia in a podcast appearance. Archived posts from Black's now-defunct Twitter/X account show him promoting the March event, and whipping up alt-right supporters with images of the event in progress. Clashes there resulted in seven injuries and 10 arrests. The event saw Kyle Chapman, hitherto known as 'Based Stickman', become a Maga celebrity after he assaulted counter-protesters with a wooden signpost while dressed in makeshift riot gear. That rally also attracted members of the Rise Above Movement, a southern California white supremacist group that was reported as having 'a singular purpose: physically attacking its ideological foes'. Following the March rally, Black, described at the time by Time magazine in its reporting at that time as a 'libertarian grant writer from the Los Angeles area' who decided to organize a 'comeback' event in Berkeley where 'rightwingers could 'come and speak, from start to finish, without being physically shut down''. The April event was even more violent, with opposing groups at first clashing in Berkeley's civic center park but then spreading into surrounding streets, and fighting with 'wooden poles, pepper spray, mace, explosives, bagels, milk, and fists'. The following Monday, on a since-deleted Twitter/X account, Black reportedly posted a video of himself in which he said, 'I could not be more satisfied with the outcome of the event', claiming that attenders including those on the far-right had taken a 'stand against radicalism and domestic terrorism'. The events also saw members of the neo-Nazi Rise Above Movement (RAM) charged over their alleged premeditated violence at both protests. A labyrinthine prosecution finally concluded last December when the one-time fugitive and RAM founder Rob Rundo was sentenced to two years of time served and two years of supervised release. Jubilee has 10 million subscribers at the time of writing, and has had some 2.8bn views across its videos, according to the analytics platform Social Blade. This puts it just inside the top 400 channels by subscribers and 6,120th by views. The channel was founded in 2010, over which time it has issued about 1,430 videos. But it enjoyed growth spurts and renewed media coverage during the last US election season, when episodes of Surrounded featuring mainstream political figures such as the senior Democrat Pete Buttigieg. In the context of this renewed interest, the CEO and founder, Jason Y Lee, told Variety that the platform aimed to 'provoke understanding and create human connection', to show 'what discourse can and should look like', and to be 'the Disney of empathy'. The Guardian contacted Lee for comment on this reporting, but received no response. In a January YouTube interview, the journalist Taylor Lorenz asked Lee if he was 'worried about getting played by the far right', given 'their ability to weaponize the attention economy and move the Overton window further to the right' by being platformed on Jubilee. Lee said 'we actually do rounds of interviews' with potential panelists, and 'we'll talk to them about their ideology, their points of view and perspectives'. Lee added: 'We don't want to favor one side or the other, but we are very careful in trying to make sure that we're not spreaders of misinformation or ideologies that might be hateful or bad.' 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