If you think you’re going crazy from nonstop news coverage of unruly behavior and disruptive protests across the country since Donald Trump was elected president, rest assured there are veiled reasons for the current madness. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Goodwin asserts the ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome,’ is no temporarily insane reaction, but rather “a calculated plan to wreck the presidency, whatever the cost to the country.”

The beginnings of this “rolling coup” happened in broad daylight in the taking down of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn as Director of National Security by residual players within the Obama intelligence community -- including the CIA and the NSA.

Political correctness remains so dominant in language and culture in the U.S., that no one dares utter the word "sedition." Unbeknownst to most Americans, Barack Obama is the first ex-president in 228 years of U.S. history to structure and lead a political organization, a shadow government, for the explicit purpose of sabotaging his successor -- duly elected President Donald Trump. The primary vehicle of this campaign is Organizing for Action (OFA), legally founded in January 2013 by First Lady Michelle Obama and her husband’s 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina, with input from David Axelrod.  

Being respectful and accepting loss when your team doesn’t win -- essential for the functioning of any electoral representative democracy and a fundamental lesson every child used to learn through playing competitive sports -- has been destroyed by the left and appears no longer relevant for many in today’s millennial generation. It was telling that a majority of millennials embraced Bernie Sanders, not because his socialist policy platform was workable, but rather because their attitudes had been so conditioned by traditional and social media and educational institutions in the U.S. that embrace all things progressive while giving short shrift to the virtues of the American story and its animating ideas. Those ideas have always been workable because they revolve around freedom that ties rights to responsibilities, the creative power of free markets and the benefits of a Constitution that mitigates government abuse through separation of powers while also ensuring stability through the rule of law.  

The modus operandi of OFA comes right out of Obama’s support and sympathy for Marxism and his background as a left-wing community organizer. It’s a combination of agitation and propaganda -- much like old-style Soviet agitprop, and Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

For Alinsky, the rules start with an ends justifies the means quest for power, which can entail lawbreaking, deception, and concealing the true revolutionary agenda; militant obstructionism; and deflecting debate on substance while relentlessly attacking the character and legitimacy of the opponent.

Agitprop is synonymous with community organizing in that both focus on stirring up public grievance over an issue for the purpose of mobilizing that constituency to join like-minded people to protest and demonstrate, which provides made-for-TV drama scenes portraying “extemporaneous” mass protests that in turn get transmitted to millions through the media. This feedback loop is a key driver of fake news.

For instance, immediately following President Trump’s late January executive order temporarily banning refugees and visitors from seven lawless states that harbor terrorists, OFA kicked into action, mobilizing people to “spontaneously” demonstrate, causing utter chaos at nearly a dozen of the busiest airports across the country. Hardly spontaneous, it was in fact staged, courtesy of ex-president Barack Obama. Ditto for what happened in late February with members of Congress town hall meetings across the country. A week before the town halls started, OFA released its “Congressional Recess Toolkit,” a training manual for activists and demonstrators, invoking them to go in groups and get to meeting halls early and “spread out… throughout the front half of the room, [which] will make the perception of broad consensus a reality for your member of congress.” So perception drives fake news which is intended to drive reality.

Many have wondered why Obama didn’t follow the tradition of almost every other ex-president and depart Washington after his term was up. Instead he moved into a large home in Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row, allegedly to provide continuity for his daughter’s education and to stay close to the shapers of his presidential legacy. Those reasons are likely secondary to his being an inbred leftist activist who lives for the “transformation” of America. Ramping up a hydra-headed organizational effort through OFA out of his 8,200 square-foot walled mansion in Washington to protect the Left’s gains and to sabotage the electoral victory of Donald Trump is simply a natural progression for Obama.

Obama is no fool and he understands -- having encouraged Black Lives Matter and the war on police and law enforcement, having facilitated ballooning welfare rolls and doubling student debt to $1.35 trillion, having presided over a flood of immigrants illegally crossing the southern border, and having pushed unprecedented deficit spending that added nearly a trillion dollars annually to the federal debt and doubling that debt in eight years to $20 trillion -- that the U.S. is nearer collapse than at any previous time. And every Marxist knows that socialist transformation first requires collapse of the old order.

Obama has not only been trained in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, but he’s familiar with  the “crisis strategy theory” of Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two neo-Marxists who taught at Columbia University, where Obama later studied. For Cloward and Piven, the left’s easiest route to socialist transformation is to overload the welfare state, which will trigger an insolvency crisis and financial collapse. U.S. Congressmen Steven King (R-Iowa) and Steve Stockman (R-Texas) have both gone on record, saying Obama was “playing out of the Cloward-Piven theory” by “attempting to flood the border with illegals.”

As Paul Sperry writes in the New York Post, “Obama has an army of agitators -- numbering more than 30,000 -- who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.” Obama’s OFA Washington HQ is now the nerve center that coordinates 250 offices nationwide, which together with its Chicago-based sister organization, the Community Organizing Institute (COI), are planning to facilitate the “training [of] more than 2 million youths in Alinsky street tactics” and carry out plans “to stage 400 rallies across 42 states to attack Trump and Republicans over ObamaCare’s repeal.”

Recent funding records are not available, but in just its first two years, OFA took in over $40 million, according to IRS filings. Not surprisingly, OFA’s major donors are also members of George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, which is a donors’ consortium of the left-wing super rich devoted to radical political change. Daniel Greenfield, the award-winning Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, believes “OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild than the Clinton Foundation ever was.” Since OFA has all the contact information assets of Obama’s predecessor 2008 and 2012 campaign organization, Organizing for America, which include 30 million email addresses, three million donors and two million active participants there should be no underestimating OFA’s potential influence, especially with an uncritical media covering it up.

But in the end, the majority of Americans are not easily fooled. Their common sense was the key factor in electing Donald Trump, an unconventionally bold leader with the courage to take on corruption in the media and in the Washington establishment. Not only was Trump successful in peeling off many traditional Democrats affiliated with labor in the rust belt states, but now Trump and his movement can further drive wedges into an increasingly fractured Democratic Party.

Although Jimmy Carter is widely viewed as the worst Democratic president, Obama has singlehandedly done more to damage the Democratic Party in eight years than the GOP could have ever hoped or planned -- an unprecedented staggering net loss of 1,042 state and federal Democratic seats, among congressional and state legislatures, governorships and the presidency. Many state-level Democratic Party leaders are now in open revolt against Obama’s OFA, which they see operating as a shadow party without coordination or accountability, and funded from controversial “end of America” extremist sources like George Soros.  

Contrary to the early vocal critics among the establishment elites, aka the “#NeverTrumpers,” it now looks like the Republican Party will not only survive, but prosper under Donald Trump, whose leadership was recently manifest in his first major speech to a joint session of congress, and is on display in his hand-picked A-team cabinet. It is the Democratic Party -- that is weak, divided, lacking in common sense and devoid of leadership and new ideas being under the grip of rigid left-wingers and ideology -- that is looking more like the endangered species, thanks in large part to Barack Obama and his Organizing for Action.

Scott Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org