Obama’s Obfuscation Fits a Partisan Pattern

By Daniel J. Flynn

Friday, May 01, 2026

 

History shows that partisans often obscure the political motivations of assassins when they threaten to tarnish their own side.

 

Barack Obama claimed in a Sunday afternoon statement that “we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.”

 

Well, we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind Obama’s Sunday afternoon statement. A generous interpretation wonders whether the former president and his handlers had composed it hours before its actual release, by which time Cole Allen’s motives seemed transparent. A more cynical, and popular, interpretation posits that by muddying clear waters Obama wished to conduct damage control for progressives and hamstring any popularity rebound for the reeling President Trump.

 

It turned out that Allen, the armed man who attempted to storm the event, donated a small amount to Kamala Harris, associated with a strange (even by left-wing standards) group called the Wide Awakes, and wrote a hyperbole-laden manifesto that demonstrated that left-wing clichés and conspiracy theories regarding the Trump administration fueled his bad decision.

 

Obama’s apparent obfuscation of all that fits a pattern. Partisans often obscure the political motivations of assassins, wannabe and actual, when they threaten to tarnish their own side. They do this by depicting the shooters as men of mystery with views opaque to outsiders. They similarly do this by inventing ideologically flattering conspiracy theories.

 

Three of the four successful assassins of U.S. presidents subscribed to some variant of communism. Charles Guiteau, who spent more than five years living at the Oneida Community that practiced a communism so extreme as to embrace group marriage and collective parenting; Leon Czolgosz, a votary of anarcho-communist Emma Goldman; and Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marxist who lived in the Soviet Union, all strangely held views shared in common with a tiny sliver of the American population. Like mental illness, extreme left-wing political beliefs stand as a fairly common denominator among those who engage in political violence.

 

Particularly in Oswald’s case, the political left — starting with the Communist Party USA just days after the assassination — undertook an enormously successful propaganda effort to delude the American people that not a communist but the CIA or the mafia or the John Birch Society or wealthy Texas oilmen murdered the president.

 

National Review grasped this from the very beginning.

 

M. Stanton Evans marveled in the National Review Bulletin published immediately after the assassination how liberals could remold facts for their ideological uses even when the facts so blatantly undermined them.

 

“The President of the United States is assassinated by a Marxist,” Evans wrote. “That Marxist is himself murdered by an idolator of the President and his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. American liberalism surveys this monstrous scenario and concludes — that it is the fault of ‘the Radical Right.’”

 

Two months later, Stefan Possony, a Hoover Institution senior fellow and occasional contributor to the magazine, foresaw a day when the American public believed in fantastical lies regarding the Kennedy assassination if the conspiracy theories did not go unchecked. He wrote to William F. Buckley Jr. of a campaign to blame the FBI or anti-communist groups for the evil deed clearly committed by a communist.

 

“This is not the first time in U.S. history that the political background of a Presidential assassination was obfuscated,” Possony wrote Buckley. “The present operation is beginning to have initial successes — if we do not set forth a factual interpretation, we shall one day rue this omission.”

 

Possony’s words, quite prophetic in retrospect, also apply to our age of assassination. The murderers of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and the failed assassins of Donald Trump, shared in common not insanity but left-wing views. For the reasons stated by Possony 62 years ago, it seems important to correct the record when tinfoil-hat types distort it, but even more so when former presidents do.