McConnell says Obama is “classless”; what the hell does he think Trump is?

Mitch McConnell, when asked by Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump—who is paid a six-digit salary as part of the Trump inbred family circle of “advisors”—about Barack Obama’s recent commentary about the job that Trump is doing containing the COVID-19 pandemic, stated "President Obama should've kept his mouth shut” and that "You know, generally, former presidents just don't do that, I remember President George W. Bush and his father went right through eight years of Democratic administrations after they left office and kept their mouths shut because they didn't feel it was appropriate for former presidents to critique even the president of another party. I think it's a little bit classless, frankly, to critique an administration that comes after you. You had your shot. You were there for eight years. I think the tradition that the Bushes set up — of not critiquing the president who comes after you — is a good tradition." Oh, just because the Bush’s supposedly “set it up,” that makes it a “tradition”? You mean it wasn’t a “tradition” before, but now it is? How convenient.

McConnell is of course being mendacious in his terms here, leaving out the very inconvenient fact of what the  current successor says about the predecessor. Michael Nöthem, a nobody right-wing tweeter, got into the act, tweeting that “Barack Hussain (sic) Obama is the first Ex-President to ever speak against his successor, which has a long history of decorum and decency. Should anyone really be surprised?” Naturally, Trump, busy scouring the Internet and Fox News for such garbage, retweeted this commentary with its deceptive claim, and thus nobodies like Nöthem briefly become a “somebody” in Trump World. 

Note that these hypocrites are not discussing the “decorum” and “decency” of talking about one’s predecessor. One would be hard-pressed to recall times when President Obama attacked George Bush, and until this past week, Trump. The Voice of America noted the degree to which Obama ignored the constant, incessant and shamelessly false attacks on him by Trump. “Obama has never directly responded to Trump’s verbal attacks but has addressed the current president's approach to politics. In a speech two months ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, Obama said the current vitriolic political discourse ‘did not start with Donald Trump.  He is a symptom, not the cause. We are Americans. We’re supposed to stand up to bullies, not follow them.’” That is a relatively mild commentary on the era of Trump. Otherwise, Obama has been remarkably reticent to talk directly about Trump and his destructive acts as president. No doubt Obama believes that Trump’s actions speak for themselves without him offering commentary on them.

What is absolutely astonishing about the hypocrisy of the right as illustrated by McConnell is that they seem to be entirely unmindful of Obama’s restraint not just in the face of Trump’s mindless fact-challenged attacks on him, but are quite content with Trump’s almost daily attempts to blame Obama for his own failures as president. The website Factbase, which is tracking the number of speeches, tweets and press events that Trump has had since he became president, currently counts more than 8,000 references directly attacking Obama or topics Trump associates with him. In late 2019 using Factbase numbers, CNN noted that three years into Trump’s presidency, his compulsive attacks on Obama only increased:

Trump used Obama's name 106 times in June, the most of any month of his presidency; 80 times in October, his third-highest monthly total; 68 times in July, his fourth-highest monthly total; 61 times in August, his fifth-highest monthly total; and 51 times in September, his ninth-highest monthly total. Over the five-month period, Trump mentioned Obama an average of 2.4 times per day. If you add in his 69 mentions of the "previous administration" or "last administration," it was 2.8 times per day. Through October, Trump had mentioned Obama by name 537 times during 2019 as a whole -- an average of 1.8 times per day. That's a 36% increase from the 395 mentions (1.3 per day) Trump made of Obama in 2018 through October of that year and a 169% increase from the 200 mentions in 2017 (0.7 per day) through October of that year.

And every time it was to attack Obama with mostly false and deliberately misleading claims along with the latest far-right conspiracy theories. Did Obama say nasty things about George Bush during and after his presidency? No he did not. Trump even attacked Bush, after the latter talked about how "In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants. We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God. We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise." McConnell’s grotesque hypocrisy in this matter is only surpassed by his craven record of rare tepid critiques of Trump’s outrages against simple human decency. Classless? Trump is the very term at its very worst.