It seemed stunningly unbelievable to Americans when we awoke last Saturday morning to find that President Donald Trump had lobbied off another series of tweets, this time accusing former President Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Towers during Trump’s campaign.
“How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” Trump tweeted Saturday morning. The claim seemed bafflingly absurd, a level of absurd we did not previously realize our president could display without some sort of official intervention.
Luckily, it seems this time the media is no longer having it. Headline after headline posits that Trump is deflecting from the major issue at hand — a probe into connections between his campaign and Russia prior to the elections, which he denied several times and which his companions all seem to be caught participating in. Virtually everyone pointed out that Trump offered no evidence whatsoever for the claims, which appeared to come out of nowhere.
Nancy Pelosi tweeted it publically, following Trump’s Saturday morning tweetstorm with “The Deflector-in-Chief is at it again. An investigation by an independent commission is the only answer,” reminding Americans that Trump is not the only elected official with questionable ties to Russia, having offered them a lucrative line of credit.
It seems an opportunity has been seized. Trump’s claim is literally completely unsupported by evidence, and he has no apparent intention of supplying it. The White House secretary Sean Spicer made no informational statements about the issue despite the explicit and clear allegations Trump made on his personal Twitter account. He only said “the tweets speak for themselves” and suggested the onus was on congress to investigate the issue now that Trump has shouted it into the void.
The claim is clearly an attempt to deflect from another investigation congress is being publically pressed to pursue, that of Trump’s ties to Putin. But whether there exists a secret relationship between the two presidents or not, Trump’s laughable attempt to pass of his randomly directed accusation is not fooling the media this time, who have chosen to press down on the Russia issue.
It’s not fooling lawmakers either, it seems, who have finally caught on to the performance that is Donald Trump. Stunned by his outlandish paranoia and childish decision to lash out in the face of a congressional investigation, Republicans have been forced to admit without hesitation that the claims are completely absurd and unsupported by any evidence.
Marco Rubio, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins and Tom Cotton, among other Republican elected officials, came out requesting Trump either expand on his accusation or withdraw it, rather than leave a baseless and stunning claim out there for Americans to worry about without any effort to resolve it.
Rather than letting Trump get away with continuing this behavior, lawmakers and the media alike need to take the next step and push for Trump supporters to begin considering the constant divorce between his statements and reality. Moments like this need to be seized; now is the time to remind voters that Trump has a history of unsubstantiated statements just from his time in the White House, from claiming all negative polls are fake polls to bragging about the inconsequential size of his inauguration crowds.
Trump is a liar. Let’s call him out on it.