On the night of Saturday, May 9, President Donald Trump tweeted five Fox News clips: One from Sean Hannity’s Hannity, two from Jeanine Pirro’s Justice With Judge Jeanine, and two from Jesse Watters’ Watters’ World.
All of the clips were about a supposed “coup d’état,” as the Fox anchors called it, committed by the Obama administration during the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. “Obamagate, that’s the subject of tonight’s ‘Watters Words'” segment, Watters said. “The Obama people got caught this week and it looks like it goes straight to the top.”
But just what is Obamagate?
Although the #Obamagate hashtag has been popular across all major platforms, it has also elicited confusion from people not tapped into the inscrutable narratives of Trump’s fervent online base.
And the president did little to clear up the confusion in a press conference on Monday afternoon: “Obamagate, it’s been going on for a long time, it’s been going on from before I even got elected,” the president said. Asked specifically what crime he was accusing Obama of, the president declined to answer. “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours,” he said.
According to data from BuzzSumo, stories about the dropped charges against Flynn have been a major talking point on right-wing social media, but stories about the declassified documents hadn’t been causing much of a blip until Fox News’ and Trump’s Saturday-night blitz, when the story started to trend via the #Obamagate hashtag.
According to an anonymous data scientist on Twitter, the #Obamagate hashtag was promoted by midsize right-wing influencers such as @AKA_RealDirty and the QAnon-affiliated @SheepKnowMore and started to trend after it was amplified by Brazilian former Olympic volleyball player Ana Paula Henkel, who has an active second life as a right-wing influencer on Twitter. “Everything has exploded now. This is journalism,” she tweeted in Portuguese, sharing the Watters World clip.