From Campaign Rhetoric to Fascist Threats: Trump Targets Obama

And YES, Russia attacked the 2016 election to install Trump

Time Magazine

While much of the political and media class continues to brush off Trump’s renewed threats to arrest Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Adam Schiff, and a long list of former government and intelligence officials as deflection from Epstein, those of us who have spent years observing autocratic regimes, intelligence weaponization, and sham prosecutions understand that these threats are neither rhetorical nor harmless. They are, in fact, deliberate signals—strategic moves in a long game of institutional sabotage, designed not only to consolidate Trump’s power but to fracture the integrity of the U.S. national security establishment and, by extension, weaken the democratic alliances that have underpinned the post–World War II world order.

What Russia did covertly, Trump is now doing openly—with the full power of the U.S. government.

While monitoring Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, I began seeing signs of a parallel operation targeting the United States. By 2015, it became unmistakably clear that Russia was actively interfering in the U.S. to install its candidate—Donald Trump. While the idea of a foreign intelligence service trying to install a president sounded outlandish to Americans, in Moscow, it was just another Tuesday. Influencing elections, compromising elites, and manipulating public discourse from within—these are core tactics in Russia’s long-standing strategy to gain leverage over a target state. I obsessively monitored their operations—watching in real time as a hostile foreign power penetrated and ultimately subverted the American political system.

Trump’s latest threat to weaponize the intelligence community—not to defend the United States, but to exonerate Russia and persecute the Obama administration is not a political stunt or solely to deflect from Epstein. It is a full-scale assault on truth, national security, and the very institutions that exposed a hostile foreign attack on our democracy.

And it comes at a moment when Trump has been actively disarming the United States from within. He has systematically dismantled the task forces charged with protecting the nation from foreign interference, domestic extremism, Russian hybrid warfare, cyberattacks, and disinformation. Units within the DOJ and DHS tasked with defending against these threats have been quietly defunded, dissolved, or stripped of their authority. The FBI’s election threat task force? Disbanded. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center? Gutted.

And, in an authoritarian-style assault on political opposition, Trump has turned the machinery of government against those who protected the country from a foreign attack: a Kremlin-orchestrated operation that began as early as 2008 and culminated in the successful interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, engineered specifically to install Trump in the White House.

And let me be clear: the attack was real. It was not a “hoax,” a “witch hunt,” or some partisan fabrication. It was a multi-faceted, sustained assault by Russia—designed to install Trump and implode the United States from within, a goal deeply rooted in Soviet strategy.

Tragically, much of the media, lacking experience or institutional knowledge of Russian intelligence operations, allowed the narrative to be hijacked and reframed as a partisan dispute. What should have been treated as a five-alarm national security emergency was instead reduced to a political food fight. The framing mattered. It poisoned public understanding and obscured the fact that by 2016, the United States had become roughly the 28th country where Russia had interfered in an election—a pattern of aggressive destabilization that had been unfolding for decades across Europe, Africa, and Latin America.

It was a calculated act of war—a long game of subversion and destabilization, executed through a multi-pronged hybrid warfare strategy that included cyberattacks, political capture, propaganda and disinformation operations, social media manipulation, and cultivated political assets inside the United States. Every major U.S. intelligence agency confirmed it, and every credible investigation affirmed it. And Trump, rather than condemning the attack or taking steps to prevent its recurrence, has spent the last decade attacking those who dared investigate it.

Trump didn’t just downplay Russia’s role—he actively aligned himself with the Kremlin. In one of the most egregious breaches of security, in 2017, Trump invited Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak into the Oval Office the day after firing FBI Director James Comey—and barred all American press from attending. Instead, TASS, the Russian state news agency long known for providing journalistic cover to Russian intelligence agents, was granted exclusive access inside the Oval Office. In that closed-door meeting, Trump reportedly bragged to the Russians that he had fired “the nut job” Comey and that the pressure of the Russia investigation was now “taken off.” He also reportedly disclosed highly classified intelligence, endangering a critical source on ISIS provided by Israel. The only photographic documentation of the meeting came from the Kremlin.

That wasn’t an aberration—it was a pattern. At the Helsinki summit in 2018, Trump stood on stage beside Vladimir Putin and publicly sided with the KGB thug over the unanimous findings of U.S. intelligence agencies, declaring he saw no reason why Russia “would” have interfered in the 2016 election. It was a blood-boiling moment of submission—an American president parroting Kremlin propaganda while undermining his own intelligence community on the world stage.

And, when a reporter asked Putin whether he had wanted Trump to win the 2016 U.S. election, Putin didn’t hesitate. “Yes, I did,” he said, “because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.”

The theater of vengeance has now taken a darker step toward authoritarian reality. At a press briefing, Tulsi Gabbard—now fully operational as a regime-aligned propagandist—announced she is formally referring former Obama to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. The charge? That Obama oversaw lawful intelligence and law enforcement efforts to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election and its coordination with Trump’s campaign—efforts that were not only legal but essential to national security.

Meanwhile, earlier this week, Trump reposted an A.I.-generated video depicting Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office, complete with fabricated footage of FBI agents storming in and detaining the former president. He has openly declared that Obama should be tried for treason—a charge that carries the death penalty—further inflaming his base’s appetite for retribution. What once might have been dismissed as absurd rhetoric must now be taken seriously, as Trump has already taken concrete steps to use the machinery of government against his political opponents, universities, and media.

And while some may argue this is merely a distraction—meant to deflect attention from the Epstein revelations—we cannot afford to downplay Trump’s calculated use of the Department of Justice as a weapon of authoritarian retribution. Even if these prosecutions ultimately collapse in court, the spectacle is the point. For a base fed a decade of lies about the “Russia hoax” and conditioned to believe that Democrats committed treason, the image of Trump moving to prosecute Obama isn’t just catharsis—it’s vindication. It signals the long-awaited beginning of the purge they were promised. And now, they want revenge.

Just as they were told the Epstein files would expose a shadowy network of Democratic predators, they’ve been promised mass arrests—and they’re demanding delivery. The MAGA base, radicalized by QAnon and fueled by years of grievance politics, isn’t interested in due process.

“Trump has spent a decade radicalizing his base with fantasies of mass arrests.”

None of this is hypothetical. The weaponization of the DOJ and intelligence agencies is already underway. Trump has called for the investigation and arrest of Adam Schiff and other political opponents. He’s launched investigations into ActBlue, Obama and Biden-era officials, and arrested a Democratic lawmaker—Rep McIver.

Trump is executing a strategy lifted directly from the Kremlin’s playbook—using sham investigations and politicized prosecutions to pursue opposition, criminalize dissent, and project an illusion of righteous authority. This is exactly how Vladimir Putin has maintained his grip on power. In Russia, the judiciary is not a check on executive power—it is a weapon. Opposition figures are smeared, labeled foreign agents, imprisoned, or killed, while NGOs are shut down and journalists prosecuted or killed.

Meanwhile, Russia is already capitalizing, amplifying Tulsi Gabbard’s sham revelations, spinning it as confirmation that the U.S. is finally “admitting” Obama orchestrated a “coup” and that the 2016 investigation was illegitimate. This isn’t Gabbard’s first assist to Moscow—she has spent over a decade parroting Kremlin propaganda, defending Russian foreign policy objectives, and whitewashing war crimes, including the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria. Her long-standing role as a Kremlin propagandist and apologist now converges perfectly with Trump’s authoritarian theatrics. It’s a grotesque inversion of reality—and a propaganda gift to Moscow that not only justifies its past interference, but paves the way for future attacks.

By targeting those who defended the United States from Russian aggression, Trump is sending a dangerous message to the world: under his leadership, America will no longer confront Kremlin interference—it will punish those who try. And if Pete Hegseth’s reckless “Signalgate” insanity wasn’t enough to make allies think twice about intelligence sharing, this latest escalation certainly will. What NATO ally would risk sharing sensitive information with a government that criminalizes its own national security professionals for doing their jobs? Trust, once broken, is hard to rebuild—and Trump is doing everything he can to ensure that trust is shattered for good.

This is precisely what Russia has worked toward for decades—not just in the United States, but across the globe. Moscow’s doctrine is to subvert democracies from within, erode public trust in institutions, and fracture alliances like NATO and the EU. Now, Trump—through relentless disinformation and open threats of prosecuting opposition—is finishing the job. Gleefully, vindictively, and with the complicity of institutions too weakened, compromised, or cowardly to stop him.

This is no longer the politics of grievance—it is the politics of vengeance, elimination, and consolidation, all cloaked in the language of patriotism. Trump has taken cues from authoritarian thugs like Putin and Orbán, absorbing the core lesson: you don’t just seize institutions—you hollow them out and weaponize them against your enemies.