Amid multiple national crises, President Donald Trump spent Thursday morning posting—not for the first time—about how his predecessor Barack Obama should be arrested, and how Georgia election workers should be prosecuted, in both cases citing unsubstantiated claims.
Trump’s fixations on going after Obama and Georgia aren’t new, but they now come at a moment of intense backlash across the country over his administration’s violent campaign targeting both immigrants and citizens in Minneapolis and nationwide.
Trump shared a screenshot of a “breaking” social media post that accused the former president of attempting a “coup” and working with “CIA agents to manufacture false intelligence” and “erode Americans’ confidence in our democracy and President Trump’s LANDSLIDE VICTORY” in 2016. In that election, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by a margin of nearly three million.
In another post sharing a screenshot, Trump switched to talking about 2020: “TRUMP WON BIG. Crooked Election!” he wrote over a post about the Georgia election results. During his second run for the presidency as a Republican, Trump lost the nation and the state of Georgia. In the more than five years since, Trump has repeatedly falsely claimed that he won the state—and attempted to interfere with election results, as when, in 2021, Trump pressured Georgia’s RepublicanSecretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a phone call to “find 11,780 votes.”
The latest escalation took place Wednesday, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed a warrant in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize records from the 2020 presidential vote in a move that legal experts called a historic attack on democratic norms.
That search happened not far from Fulton County Jail, where Trump was booked and had his mugshot taken in 2023 after being indicted by the county’s District Attorney Fani Willis on charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 vote in Georgia.
