By
Not quite two months into Donald Trump’s presidency, congressional Republicans had reason for optimism. The party controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House, and GOP leaders were making ambitious plans. At the time, however, Rep. Mike Kelly feared one man might stand in the way of the party’s goals.
“President Obama himself said he was going to stay in Washington until his daughter graduated,” the Pennsylvania Republican said. “I think we ought to pitch in to let him go someplace else, because he is only there for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to run a shadow government that is going to totally upset the new agenda. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Kelly was at least partially right — the congressman’s rhetoric just didn’t “make sense” — but the idea that Barack Obama was some kind of nefarious force, wielding power from the shadows, didn’t fade from Republicans’ imaginations after Kelly’s comments in March 2017.
As recently as last year, Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo suggested that the former president might be secretly “running the country,” to which Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee replied that Obama’s meetings with President Joe Biden led people to believe that the former president was “the de facto leader in the White House.”
Yesterday, Rep. Greg Murphy kept this going during an interview of his own with Bartiromo. After the far-right North Carolinian pontificated for a while on his theories about Biden having plastic surgery, Murphy — a urologist by trade — thought it’d be a good idea to diagnose the president from a distance, suggesting to Fox Business viewers that the Democrat has “dementia.”
But in case that weren’t quite offensive enough, the Republican congressman then added that Biden is merely “a puppet for a progressive left committee, as it were, headed by Obama....”
I’ll confess, I’ve never heard of this “committee” that’s running the White House, though I suspect Murphy can concoct some fascinating ideas about the secret cabal’s membership and wicked ways.
Obviously, there is no “progressive left committee” pulling the strings of the executive branch; the president is not a “puppet”; and Greg Murphy is a difficult politician to take seriously. But as part of the GOP congressman's bonkers on-air comments, it was his reference to Obama that stood out as especially odd.
The former president left office nearly seven years ago. He remains one of the more popular and respected figures in American politics. Perhaps Republicans should find someone else to peddle strange ideas about?