“This is, like, proof – irrefutable proof – that Obama was seditious, that Obama was trying to lead a coup. ... Obama headed it up.”

Truth Social posts and Oval Office remarks following DNI Tulsi Gabbard's July 2025 report release

PolitiFact rated this claim 'Pants on Fire,' its harshest rating for ridiculous falsehoods. The documented record shows Obama did the opposite of a coup: he publicly acknowledged Trump's 2016 victory, hosted him at the White House, and oversaw a peaceful transfer of power on January 20, 2017.

The Gabbard report 'proves' nothing of the sort. FactCheck.org found it rests on a manufactured contradiction: pre-election assessments said Russia hadn't hacked voting machines to change vote tallies, while the January 2017 assessment found Russia ran an influence campaign to help Trump. Those are two different things, and both were true. The Russian-interference finding Trump calls a 'coup' was confirmed by a bipartisan, Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigation that interviewed over 200 witnesses and reviewed more than a million pages of documents, and by the Mueller probe, which indicted 25 Russian nationals for the interference operation. Marco Rubio, now Trump's own secretary of state, sat on that committee and said it found 'irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.' Legal experts add that the 'treason' charge is constitutionally absurd: treason requires levying war against the United States or aiding its enemies in wartime. No prosecutor, court, or congressional investigation, including those run by Trump's own appointees, has ever found evidence of a coup attempt by Obama.

"We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling." — Marco Rubio, then a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and now Trump's secretary of state, Aug. 18, 2020