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On its face, the assertion that Barack Obama and other members of his administration committed “treason” by telling the American people that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump, and that this amounts to a “coup,” is so patently preposterous that anybody who repeats it should not be taken seriously. 

The problem is that the people who are disseminating the “Gabbard Hoax,” which is what we will call it going forward, include the president of the United States, the director of national intelligence (DNI), many GOP lawmakers, and the leading cable news network. And, by virtue of their influence on tens of millions of Americans, they unfortunately have to be taken seriously.

But first, let’s break down once again why the Gabbard Hoax is so absurd.

Various criminal prosecutions, an independent Department of Justice (DOJ) probe, and a bipartisan Senate investigation have all conclusively established that Russia intervened in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf by hacking the email accounts of Democrats and leaking the contents to the media, and by running an extensive influence campaign targeting Hillary Clinton. 

In addition, it has been proven that there were extensive ties between Vladimir Putin’s regime and Trump’s team. 

However, none of the investigations has been able to conclusively prove that Moscow “colluded” with the campaign. 

In other words, there is ample proof that Russia helped Trump, but not that they did so in concert with his team. 

Based on the failure to definitively establish collusion, the president has concocted the lie that the entire thing is a “hoax.”

In other words, it’s like saying that Christmas doesn’t exist because there is no Santa.

But that hasn’t stopped Trump — who cannot deal with the fact that he probably would not have won in 2016 without Russia’s help — and his allies from claiming it’s all a hoax. 

Last week, DNI Tulsi Gabbard took it a step further. 

She released a “report” that allegedly showed that Obama and others in his administration manipulated intelligence to mislead Americans into believing that Russia changed the outcome of the election by hacking voting machines. 

That’s insane!

Russia did influence the election, but it did not manage to change the actual vote count, as Obama was quite clear about.

Therefore, all of this is theater. 

But it is also a microcosm of how Trump and his supporters operate. They come up with a lie, and they keep repeating it over and over until tens of millions of GOP voters believe it. 

And it is maddening that it works over and over… even when it is as clumsily done as in the past week, when Trump needed to find a way to distract his base from his old pal Jeffrey Epstein. 

That ploy became apparent on Tuesday, when the president deflected a question about his former friend to talk about this “scandal.” 

“This was treason,” Trump said. “Barack Hussein Obama is the ringleader. Hillary Clinton was right there with him and so was Sleepy Joe Biden, and so were the rest of them: [former FBI Director James] Comey, [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, the whole group. They tried to rig an election and they got caught. And then they did rig the election in 2020.”

All of this is complete nonsense and the opposite of the truth, which should be obvious to anybody who pauses for just a second to think about what the president is saying here. 

What Trump would have people believe is that in 2016, when they were controlling the White House, Democrats tried to rig an extremely close election but failed. And then, four years later, when he was in office, they somehow succeeded. 

None of this makes sense, but that doesn’t matter to Trump’s supporters. 

And it may not matter to a super-weaponized DOJ, which could pursue some sort of charges to unite the base after a couple of tough weeks for the president. 

Chances are, however, that this will not result in anything other than endless Fox News segments that will leave Trump supporters wondering why no action is being taken if this really was the greatest scandal in the history of politics, as the president would have them believe. 

Of course, if they ever get upset about DOJ’s lack of action, then Trump will conjure up the next big lie to keep them in line. 

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.