‘

Raise your hand if you’re shocked that Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein’s flop-sweating wingman, has been trying to blame his metastasizing scandal on Barack Obama.

No? Me neither.

When Trump opened his pie hole the other day and babbled that Obama had written the feds’ Epstein files and should be jailed for supposedly trying to “rig” the 2016 election, those of us with long memories nodded knowingly because the cornered rat is so predictable. Worse yet is Trump’s panicked desperation, as evidenced by his reposting of an AI-edited video showing Obama in handcuffs.

His Obama obsession is now in its 14th year, dating back to his racist lie that the president was foreign-born and therefore not a real American. By now it’s easy to forget how often Trump frothed about Obama during the former’s first term, like when he lied that Obama had created the policy of separating migrant families at the border, lied about Obama landing a shady book deal with Penguin Random House, and lied about Obama ruining the White House air conditioning. Just to name a few.

A clinical psychologist nailed it quite well six years ago for Psychology Today: “In Obama, Trump sees his antithesis – everything he is not and cannot be…Obama is a man in full, self-made, self-aware, self-contained, at peace with himself, at ease in the world. He traffics in inspiration,” whereas Trump “is constantly aggrieved, embittered, anmd at war with the world. Trump traffics in debasement.” Indeed, “so long as Obama exists, Trump is threatened,” because someone with Trump’s pathology “labors most to destroy that which is most threatening.”

And Obama is a person of color. That’s the key component. What Trump truly cannot abide is that a Black guy of high intellect who rose on his merit is demonstrably more popular than he is. For a white supremacist, nothing could be as galling.

A Gallup poll five months ago named Obama as “the most admired living president,” with a double digit lead over Trump. Worldwide, it’s the same story. Ever since Obama left office, roughly 75 percent of citizens polled in 24 countries have viewed him as the kind of president who would “do the right thing regarding world affairs.” The pollsters at Pew, in a global survey earlier this year, found that only 34 percent had that kind of confidence in Trump.

The big question – in the wake of the Epstein scandal, with clear evidence of a Trump coverup (he has known since May that his name was in the files that he’d earlier vowed to release) – is whether his Obama obsession still plays well with the cultists.

Right on cue, various MAGA meatheads have been trying to make it so. Senator Markwayne Mullin said on CNN the other day Obama gave Epstein a slap on the wrist, but the sweetheart plea deal happened in 2008, during the Bush administration. The deal was approved by a Bush-appointed U.S. attorney, the same guy who, nine years later, was rewarded by Trump with a Cabinet post.

Other toadies have been more ambitious. Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas told Fox Business that Obama “lied to us about Covid,” a statement that flunks the math test, because Obama was three years out of office when Covid hit. But the award for Orwellian misdirection goes to smash-mouth radio host Mark Levin, who tweeted: “The Democrats are using Epstein to distract from Obama.”

I would like to believe at least some of the cultists will cough up this snake oil. Trump won last year in part because he’d promised his naifs that he’d blow the lid off the Epstein case and expose a deep state/Dem pedophile conspiracy. He whipped up their paranoia and conditioned them to expect a payoff. Now he’s staging a cover up and betting that he can skate by with fresh nonsense.

Who knows, maybe he’ll make it work. America has been reduced to a fascist and a complicit political party covering for a pedophile.

But the upside, for Obama, is that Trump has the attention span of a fruit fly and may have already shifted his blame game. On Monday he lied that the Epstein files “were run by the worst scum on Earth. They were run by Comey, they were run by Garland, they were run by Biden, and all of the people that actually ran the government, including the auto pen.”

The auto pen did it!

Which prompts me to wonder: Is it black?

Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]