This fake Donald Trump video once would have shocked. Now America shrugs

The most interesting aspect of Donald Trump’s latest out-there internet post may have been the reaction, which was pretty much ‘meh’.

On the weekend the US president posted on TikTok, then his Truth Social online network, a fake video of former Democrat President Barack Obama being arrested by FBI officers in the Oval Office while Mr Trump watched, smiling. Mr Obama then appeared in a cell wearing an orange jumpsuit while the Village People’s YMCA played in the background.

America used to have a convention that presidents did not criticise their predecessors. That approach is long gone under Mr Trump, and commentators struggled to muster outrage at the latest attack. Apart from a few media complaints that Mr Trump had gone too far, the reaction to what might have been considered a year ago beyond the pale was muted.

“It’s funny and sad to watch what America has become,” one person wrote on the Fox News Los Angeles YouTube page.

Another said: “We still want the Epstein Files. We are not interested in distractions”

‘Deep state’

Even the New York Times, one of the president’s leading critics, gave the story 15 paragraphs from an online reporter in London. Like many observers, the paper perceived the artificial intelligence-generated video to be an attempt by Mr Trump to shift attention away from Jeffrey Epstein, the late, disgraced financier who was a friend of Mr Trump’s and a trafficker of girls for sex.

The Government’s announcement a week ago that no Epstein client list existed continues to trouble many supporters of the President, who promised before his election to publish the names allegedly contained on it. Conspiracy theorists hoped the revelations would lead to the collapse of what they call the “deep state”.

Mr Trump has since promised to ask courts to make public grand jury testimony given in Epstein’s prosecutions. That has not been enough to satisfy what is known as the MAGA world, which remains convinced powerful business and political figures operate as a shadow government with the help of the intelligence services.

Russia claims

The Obama-arrest video was not random. The White House is building a public case that the 44th president conspired to frame Mr Trump for working with Russia to subvert the 2016 election.

On Friday, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, published documents she said showed the Obama administration spread fake news about the “Russia Hoax” and suppressed intelligence reports that found Russia did not have the capacity to subvert the presidential election.

In reality, the Obama White House never claimed Russian hackers manipulated votes. Investigators concluded Russian hackers probed election systems for vulnerabilities and obtained voter lists from at least two states, but found no evidence they tried to change the outcome.

“We were totally innocent, it was all a giant hoax!” Mr Trump posted on Truth Social in capitals.

Only six months

In between videos celebrating his six months in office, Mr Trump posted messages implying Mr Obama and the leading members of his government at the time should be imprisoned.

There were other messages too. He threatened to cut federal funding for a new stadium for the Washington Commanders NFL team unless they reverted to a previous name, the Redskins. The Cleveland Guardians should revert to the Indians, he said. Rolling Stone magazine reported it as a command to “make their names racist again”.

Then, on Monday afternoon, Mr Trump played his trump card: nearly a quarter-million declassified pages on the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King were published online.

Even in a country fascinated by assassination conspiracy theories, the documents struggled to attract interest. One biographer of the civil rights leader, David Garrow, said: “I saw nothing that struck me as new.”