A CONSPIRACY SO VAST...:

On the surface, Trump's deranged Mother's Day tweetstorm and the halfhearted trolling of his predecessor at his Monday press conference seem like just a couple more examples of the mad king feeding his fans a juicy porterhouse--in this case, a theory about President Obama's supposed crimes that is so stupid that even the president himself can't answer the most basic question about it.

But underneath the palpable jealousy and the desperate attempt to change the subject to something, anything besides the slow-motion pandemic-management disaster that he is overseeing, is a very real effort by President Trump and his enablers to undermine the rule of law, rewrite the history of the 2016 election, and give a hall pass to a hostile foreign power for its interference in our election. Trump's allies in the conservative media and the Justice Department are taking #Obamagate very seriously. This conspiracy theory is informing our foreign policy, millions in tax dollars are being spent in an effort that is going "full throttle" to prove that it is correct, and countless Americans are being fed a faux history involving a crime that supposedly "makes Watergate look small time."

In that context, "President Fabricates Crimes By His Predecessor" should be front-page news, an unprecedented assault on the office of the president and our system of justice. An action that under any previous president would have sparked a massive backlash from within his own party among institutionalists concerned about both their short-term political interests and the broader historic implications.

Part of the reason that it isn't happening is, again, the that's-just-Trump-being-Trump impulse: His awful absurdity and absurd awfulness have dulled the senses to such a degree that the journalists who are accused of peddling "fake news" attacks on him don't take him seriously, and even people who are well attuned to politics don't understand what he's talking about and believe that his #Obamagate spiel is some throwaway nonsense. I'm confident that Joe Republican Senator could not begin to describe to you with any specificity the contours of the purported Obamagate scandal. Hell, the president himself couldn't even describe it during his press conference.

But his comic incompetence does not make such a matter less serious, it makes it more serious.

So for those who have dismissed this as another passing fancy, here is a breakdown of what exactly #Obamagate is and why it matters.

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