President Trump expressed irritation that House Democrats are challenging his unprecedented refusal to disclose his tax returns and even more unprecedented insistence on using his office for private gain. When Republicans controlled the House, he told reporters, they never investigated President Obama:
We want to find out what happened with the last Democrat president. Let’s look into Obama the way they looked at me from day one. They’ve looked into everything that we’ve done. They could look into the book deal that President Obama made. Let’s subpoena all of his records …
Frankly, the Republicans were gentlemen, and women. When we had the majority in the House, they didn’t do subpoenas all day long.
Like many criminals, Trump believes that everybody is a crook and views demands that he follow the law as mere hypocrisy. Here he pivots immediately from his rage that he is being asked to comply with basic ethical norms — in this same interview Trump threatened to raise tariffs on French wine, a move that would benefit Trump’s own winery — to insinuations that President Obama probably committed financial crimes, too.
Trump’s claim that Republicans never investigated Obama is especially bizarre. Congress held eight separate investigations on Benghazi alone. The redundancy was deemed necessary because conservatives simply refused to accept findings that no scandal had taken place.
Trump, reaching for evidence that Obama probably did something just as unethical as Trump did, comes up with … Obama’s book. You can almost see the wheels turning in Trump’s brain as he tries to summon some damning piece of evidence about his predecessor.
He wrote a book! Is that allowed? Sure, Trump claimed to have written books, but those were all ghostwritten. He doesn’t even read books, let alone write them. “Writing books” has to be some kind of scam, right?
Perhaps sensing the book thing was not enough, Trump proceeded to blame Obama for ruining the temperature-control system in the West Wing:
And yet Trump is the one being investigated while Obama walks the streets a free man.
