A sitting president’s social media account is not supposed to be the place where you go to find out what’s actually on his mind. The official version is press conferences, prepared statements, policy announcements, the kinds of things that get drafted and reviewed and handed to a communications team before anyone sees them. Social media was always a workaround, a direct line that bypassed the filters. But most people assumed there were still some filters somewhere, some instinct toward restraint when the stakes were high enough. When the president is scheduled to board Air Force One for a major diplomatic trip to China the next morning, for instance.
The night before that flight, on May 11 and into May 12, 2026, the president’s Truth Social account produced 55 posts in three hours. Not one of them was about China. Not a word about trade negotiations or what he planned to say to President Xi Jinping. What the posts were about, consistently and repeatedly, was Barack Obama, and what should happen to him. The word “treason” appeared more than once. So did the word “arrest.”
55 Posts in Three Hours
According to Snopes, Trump’s posting spree ran from around 10:14 p.m. on May 11 until 1:12 a.m. on May 12, 2026, across his Truth Social account. While Trump is well-known for posting inflammatory statements on the platform, social media users were struck by the sheer frequency, which produced a timeline that fact-checkers were able to document post by post, minute by minute.
The president was scheduled to board Air Force One for a trip to China one day later, so reasonable people might have assumed he would spend the evening in some kind of preparation. Instead, across those three hours, he posted 55 messages, all of which were, in the description of multiple reporters who catalogued them, bizarre, offensive, conspiratorial, or some combination of all three.
His posts included what fact-checkers described as nonsensical AI-generated content, unhinged conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, and rants claiming that his political enemies had committed treason. The through-line connecting the whole production, though, was unmistakably Barack Obama.
The Call for Arrest
The most inflammatory posts were not ones Trump wrote himself. One post Trump promoted and amplified, but did not personally write, called for Obama to be “arrested,” “prosecuted,” and “incarcerated” for what it described as “treachery, treason, and seditious conspiracy to overthrow the United States government.”
The spree opened with a video from former Republican Rep. Devin Nunes claiming Trump’s transition team had been surveilled by U.S. intelligence. Trump then reposted it alongside a screenshot claiming Obama had worked with the CIA in 2016 to engineer the “Russian Hoax.” A Fox News segment repeating Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s accusation followed immediately after.
At 10:15 p.m., Trump reposted a screenshot calling for the arrest of “Obama the traitor.” And that was just the first minute.
Over those three hours, Trump’s posts also targeted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator Mark Kelly, and former special counsel Jack Smith, and included AI-generated images depicting House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, former President Joe Biden, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The Claims, One by One
The posts amounted to a rotating catalogue of debunked conspiracy theories, several of which date back nearly a decade and have been examined and rejected by courts, investigators, and fact-checkers multiple times over.
CNN’s fact-check of the spree confirmed that Trump amplified the long-running claim that Obama had personally wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 election, for which there is no evidence. In 2017, Trump’s own Justice Department stated in a court filing that it had no records to support any claim that Trump Tower had been wiretapped in 2016.
Trump also shared a pro-Trump commentator’s post featuring a supposed attack on Obama from Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana. The quote was completely fabricated. In the fake version, “Kennedy” demanded that Obama return $120 million supposedly earned through the Affordable Care Act, which he never actually did. Kennedy himself told the outlet NOTUS that he had heard something was “floating around on the internet” with his name on it, and said plainly: “I didn’t say that. I don’t know the basis of it.”
Trump shared another post containing a link to a page filled with false claims about the Obama administration, including that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had used her private email server to sell top-secret information to foreign entities, that Obama had ordered a coverup, and that nine of 13 New York police officers attempting to expose the truth had “committed suicide or died in suspicious circumstances.” The same page recycled the long-debunked claim of a “Birth Certificate Scandal” purporting to prove Obama was never eligible to be president.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from watching the same false accusations get laundered through new posts, dressed up in new screenshots, amplified by the most powerful social media account on earth, as if repetition and volume were a substitute for evidence.
The Gabbard Connection
The backdrop to the May posting spree is not new. Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had recently released declassified documents claiming the Obama administration had manufactured intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 election and used it to build a false collusion narrative against Trump. The memos showed that Obama had requested an assessment of Russian interference and the foreign adversary’s connections to the Trump campaign, which Gabbard characterized as criminal.
According to reporting from TheGrio, a U.S. president being briefed about national and foreign intelligence or requesting more information is not a crime, and despite Gabbard claiming she made a criminal referral to the DOJ, no indictments have been made against Obama or any former Obama official. A DOJ special counsel investigation of the 2016 Russia interference campaign, led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge anyone. Former Biden DOJ official Anthony Coley was direct about what he saw: “This isn’t just false; it’s reckless. Repeating debunked conspiracy theories about a former president doesn’t make them true, and it drags the country deeper into division.”
Following the earlier DNI report that sought to implicate Obama in criminal activity, a spokesperson for Obama’s office issued a rare public statement. The spokesperson said that Obama’s team does not normally respond to the “constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House,” but that the allegations were “outrageous” and warranted a response. The claims, the spokesperson added, amounted to an attempt at “distraction.”
This Is Not the First Time
For context on how far back this particular version of the wiretapping accusation goes: the Wikipedia entry on the Spygate conspiracy theory) documents that Trump’s assertion Obama had his “wires tapped” in Trump Tower dates to March 2017, and his own Justice Department stated in federal court briefs in September 2017 and October 2018 that the claim was untrue.
Last summer, Trump posted an avalanche of content to his platform that included calls for criminal charges against Obama. The May 2026 posting spree was not an isolated incident but the latest version of a pattern that has repeated itself at irregular intervals across both of Trump’s terms, each time louder, each time supported by a slightly different arrangement of the same underlying claims, none of which have resulted in charges.
By the morning of May 12, Trump made several more posts before announcing he was “off to China.” These included images of U.S. drones and aircraft carriers with captions like “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!” and an image of a $100 bill bearing his own face.
The China trip, and the actual, consequential diplomacy attached to it, apparently required no late-night preparation.
What This Actually Means
The real question is not whether any of the claims are true. They are not. The wiretapping claim was rejected by Trump’s own Justice Department in 2017. The $120 million Obamacare windfall was traced in earlier reporting cycles to a satirical website. The senator’s quote that Trump amplified did not exist. The DOJ reviewed Gabbard’s criminal referral and did not charge anyone. The architecture of this particular obsession has been examined, dismantled, and set aside many times over by investigators, fact-checkers, and courts.
What the posts reveal is something harder to fact-check: a sitting president who, with a consequential foreign policy trip hours away, chose to spend the middle of the night calling for his predecessor’s imprisonment in a cascade of recycled grievances, fabricated quotes, and AI-generated imagery. That is a fact about right now, in 2026, not a fact about 2016. Whatever the underlying motive, whether distraction, fixation, political theater, or some combination of all three, the posts are the record. They happened. They were amplified by the account with the largest platform in American politics. And no indictment followed, because the evidence for one does not exist.
You can hold the absurdity of a fake senator’s quote and the genuine weight of a president calling for his predecessor’s arrest at the same time. One does not cancel out the other.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.