All of a sudden, President Donald Trump believes Russia interfered in the 2016 election. And it’s all because of his predecessor Barack Obama.
At the top of Monday’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough joked that Obama must have gone on vacation to the island where Luke Skywalker ended up in The Force Awakens because he has been pulling “extraordinary Jedi mind tricks” on Trump.
“Everybody’s been trying to get him to admit, every reporter in Washington, that the Russians meddled with our elections,” Scarborough said of President Trump. “And Barack Obama comes back and goes, ‘The Russians meddled with our elections,” he added, making the Jedi mind trick gesture.
This past Friday, The Washington Post reported that the Obama administration weighed a more forceful response to the Kremlin once it became clear that they were trying to influence the outcome of the presidential race, but ultimately declined to do so.
In the words of one former White House official, “I feel like we sort of choked.”
By that night, Trump was acknowledging “election meddling by Russia” for the first time on Twitter:
“How many people have tried to get Donald Trump to admit that the Russians meddled with the 2016 election?” Scarborough asked. “All Barack Obama has to do is just come back on the scene in his Jedi garb.”
Similarly, Obama called the Senate GOP’s health care bill “mean” in his Facebook post late last week and a few days later, Trump was admitting that he had called it “mean” on Fox News.
“Obama! Strong the force is with his family,” Scarborough added, doing his best Yoda impression. He then cut to clip of Obama in action before playing the Obi-Wan Kenobi “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” scene from A New Hope.
“Just because Donald Trump is so crazy and so jealous of Barack Obama, he gets him to admit that the healthcare bill is ‘mean,’” Scarborough said. “And he goes, ‘That’s my word! I’m the one who said it was ‘mean.’ I’m the one that said it was going to throw seniors out of the street! I’m the one who said that young children with pre-existing conditions were going to die!’”
Of course, this is not the first time the idea of Obama as Jedi master has come up. At a news conference in 2013, Obama said of his conflict with Republicans over the sequester, "I'm presenting a fair deal, the fact that they don’t take it means that I should somehow, you know, do a Jedi mind meld with these folks and convince them to do what’s right."
The internet promptly pounced on him for apparently conflating Star Wars’ “Jedi mind trick” with Star Trek’s “Vulcan mind meld.”