Obama Isn’t Going Anywhere

 The former president lost big on Nov. 5. But he doesn’t seem interested in leaving D.C., or American politics.

Donald Trump’s decisive victory last week was the only logical plot point in the most remarkable story in American political history. After the protagonist is humiliated, exiled and silenced, runs the gantlet of a justice system that means to imprison him for life, gets shot in the face, and escapes another murder attempt, he humbles himself, prays, cloaks himself, and walks among everyday Americans, as a fast-food worker then as a sanitation man, which shows him there are winners everywhere you look in America. And then he wins, too. It’s not an American story if he doesn’t win.

But the story of Trump’s rise and fall and redemption isn’t over yet. If he doesn’t drive Barack Obama out of Washington, D.C., and dismantle his private- and public-sector network, Trump can still ultimately lose. His first term was undermined by Obama allies in U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and there’s evidence that the heart of the resistance is now ensconced inside the Pentagon and already poised to fight him. This threatens not only the Trump presidency but also the stability of the country. After fulfilling campaign promises to close the borders, embark on a massive deportation program sending millions of illegal aliens home, and appoint an attorney general capable of restoring the rule of law, the president-elect’s top priority must be to bring an end to the Obama era.

Presidents leave the capital city after their term in office to demonstrate their respect for one of the fundamental principles of our republic: the transfer of executive authority from one president to another. Obama stayed to underscore the opposite.

Woodrow Wilson, the only other ex-president who stayed put, had been incapacitated by a stroke midway through his second term and couldn’t leave. Obama announced at the start of his second term he wasn’t going away, and spent the first four years of his post-White House tenure to lead the resistance, and the next four as shadow president.

Obama never hid his role as the real center of power during Joe Biden’s term. When he retired the old man to make way for the candidate he’s preferred since at least 2019, Obama simply grabbed the mic and took center stage. The “Kamala Harris” campaign—whose “New Way Forward” slogan he premiered—was, in reality, just another Barack Obama campaign. Harris, who had never won a primary vote and withdrew from the 2020 race polling at 3%, had already been vetted and her record showed that she was unlikable, and more exposure made her even more unlikable. Pushing Harris on Democratic voters in the middle of a medical emergency—Biden’s cognitive meltdown during the June debate—and giving them no other choice was the only way to get her on track for the White House.

On election night, Obama stepped up to steady Harris voters—and demoralize Trump supporters—by promising a late-hour comeback similar to Biden’s four-years ago. “It took several days to count every ballot in 2020, and it’s very likely we won’t know the outcome tonight either,” he tweeted. “Let the process run its course. It takes time to count every ballot.”

Social media MAGA saw a repeat of the 2020 “red-mirage blue-shift” blackout when ballot-counting mysteriously shut down with Trump ahead, restarted hours later, typically without poll observers, and ended with Biden tallying 81 million votes—more than 15 million more votes than Clinton received in 2016. The reason it didn’t take days to announce a winner this time is because Trump lawyers won enough battles against Marc Elias and other Obama-allied lawyers to defend election integrity against procedures designed to facilitate fraud. And thus, in the end, Obama lost twice on election night: His puppet lost at the ballot box, and his legal team lost in court.

To obscure his culpability for the party’s loss, media accounts claim that what Obama wanted all along was an open primary—in reality a catastrophic scenario that would have entailed the party’s leading lights eviscerating each other three months before the election. And now, instead of installing another figurehead to occupy what in his estimation is the ceremonial position of president while he and his faction held real power, Obama must fight to stay relevant.

Following the election, he issued a statement shortly after Harris gave her concession speech. This marked another Obama first—no other former president has distributed his opinions to the public in the immediate aftermath of a presidential election, because no previous holder of that office intended to give the impression that he was still involved in deciding the fate of the nation.

“America,” Obama wrote, “has been through a lot over the last few years—from a historic pandemic and price hikes resulting from the pandemic, to rapid change and the feeling a lot of folks have that, no matter how hard they work, treading water is the best they can do. Those conditions have created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world, and last night showed that America is not immune.”

The “folks,” in Obama’s condescending account, were not rejecting the transformative program he championed. Rather, they were reacting, likely irrationally, to phenomena that lacked cause or agency. There have been “price hikes resulting from the pandemic”—not historic levels of inflation caused by the Biden administration’s climate change agenda that has transferred trillions in middle-class wealth to Democratic Party donors and clients as well as the People’s Republic of China. There has been “rapid change”—which is to say the tens of millions of illegal aliens the Biden administration has ushered across the border in less than four years, spiking crime rates, suppressing the wages of U.S. workers, burdening taxpayers with the cost of education, housing, and other services for noncitizens. In any case, it’s not that this “change” wasn’t progress. It’s just that it may have happened too fast. And these “conditions,” which in Obama’s construction materialized out of the blue, “created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world.”

No doubt this document was read, drafted, and revised dozens of times by a team of Obama loyalists to ensure that every word served a purpose. “Around the world” is intended to underscore the small “d” in democratic—Obama is not talking about an American political party but rather a political system. Trump didn’t beat Democrats, he thwarted democracy by defeating its defenders. In contrast to Harris, Trump is more like a right-wing fascist, or an authoritarian strongman, like Vladimir Putin, for instance. Thus, in the context of democracy, Trump’s presidency is not legitimate. And that calls for resistance.

Immediately after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat, Obama set in motion the multi-pronged operation to undermine his successor. Obama told his FBI Director James Comey to continue the investigation, and surveillance, of the president-elect that was initiated while Trump was the GOP candidate. Further, the outgoing president directed CIA chief John Brennan to produce an official assessment asserting that Trump owed the presidency to Putin. By using the U.S. government’s official imprimatur to validate the conspiracy theory that Trump had been compromised by a foreign power, Obama delegitimized Trump’s presidency at its birth and divided the country. Now Obama is looking for another play, and it appears that it involves splitting the armed forces.

Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed Pentagon personnel to carry out a smooth transition and reminded them “to carry out the policy choices of its next Commander in Chief, and to obey all lawful orders from its civilian chain of command.”

It’s not the first time an outgoing Pentagon chief counseled his subordinates to abide by their oaths to the Constitution—what’s of potential concern is that the phrase “lawful orders” appears to contain a warning that some military officials’ decisions regarding lawful orders may be shaped by anti-Trump animus. What orders is Austin referring to? First, Trump has indicated he might use the military to assist in carrying out his incoming administration’s operation to deport illegal immigrants. Further, the Trump White House is planning to shrink the size of the bureaucracy, which also includes Pentagon officials. The resistance has already picked up on the cues left in Austin’s message.

For instance, in a report on Pentagon officials discussing how to respond in the event Trump issued unlawful orders, CNN correspondent Natasha Bertrand emphasized the threat implicit in Austin’s wording and wrote that “the US military will obey only lawful orders.” Bertrand famously drove the Trump-Russia narrative with leaks from intelligence officials, and in October 2020, she was first to report on the letter authored by 51 former spies falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” That is, the CNN reporter is a delivery mechanism for anti-Trump information operations, and this particular op has been in the works for nearly a year.

In January, NBC News reported that former Obama officials and Democratic Party operatives were already plotting to derail Trump’s agenda under the pretext that he was aiming to use U.S. military to implement his political agenda. “We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to,” said Mary McCord, a former DOJ lawyer who oversaw its unlawful Trump-Russia probe. Another partner in the Pentagon op, according to the NBC story, is Democracy Forward, chaired by Marc Elias, who paid for the Trump-Russia dossier when he was a lawyer for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.

In May and June, former Obama Pentagon official Rosa Brooks convened past Democratic and Republican officials to war-game scenarios for the postelection period. She’d done the same for the 2020 election with the Transition Integrity Project, a messaging campaign that prepared Democrats for the ballot count to drag on long past election day making Biden the winner and leaving Trump to contest the election. For this election, she joined with reporter Barton Gellman and the Democracy Futures Project to “forecast” the aftermath of election 2024.

The scenarios were made public on July 30 in an obvious media rollout, with stories in The Bulwark, where Brooks herself sketched the scenarios; The Washington Post, in a piece authored by Gellman; as well as The New Republic and The Guardian, the last of which gave the most detail on the various war games. One scenario posits the possibility “that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to go against street protests.” In other words, riots designed to block Trump policies would be as bad or worse than the spring and summer 2020 George Floyd riots when Trump reportedly entertained the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act. Those social justice demonstrations left 19 dead and caused billions of dollars worth of damage in dozens of cities across the country.

“In the course of the Insurrection Act tabletop exercise,” according to the Guardian report, “the person role-playing Trump initially met resistance from senior military figures who tried to cling to the Posse Comitatus Act barring federal troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement.” The account relayed that as the scenario unfolded, Trump fired the officers who disobeyed his orders and replaced them with officers who implemented them.

Last week’s CNN article picked up on the same themes and keywords: “The president’s powers are especially broad if he chooses to invoke the Insurrection Act, which states that under certain limited circumstances involved in the defense of constitutional rights, a president can deploy troops domestically unilaterally,” wrote Bertrand. “A separate law—the Posse Comitatus Act—seeks to curb the use of the military to enforce laws unless authorized by Congress. But the law has exceptions for rebellion and terrorism, which ultimately gives the president broad leeway in deciding if and when to invoke [the] Insurrection Act.”

With this, the tabletop exercises and the communications component for the anti-Trump Pentagon op are in order. Does the resistance really intend to move pieces in place to split the military or are they just bluffing to get Trump to back off on campaign promises that will topple two of its pillars? It might seem strange to threaten to destabilize the country on behalf of defense bureaucrats and illegal aliens, but the former constitute a crucial part of Obama’s network, and giving the latter the vote, as Trump’s landslide victory shows, may be the Democrats’ best chance to win national elections in the near future. It’s tempting to read the Brooks scenarios and the CNN report as resistance porn—a performance of the rituals and motions that this class has accustomed itself to over the course of the past eight years, as it now braces for the return of the president it did its best and failed to destroy.

Would Obama fracture the military to once again cripple Trump’s term in office? The former president is in a decidedly weaker position and facing a battle-hardened Trump. Still, it would be reckless to assume the best from the man who already proved his willingness to weaponize the national security apparatus against his political opponent. The president-elect shouldn’t take any chances.

 

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/obama-not-going-anywhere