As a charter member of Do Something Twitter, it’s good to find an ally in a widely respected former president.

“I think it’s going to require a little bit less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions. And it’s going to require Democrats to just toughen up,” Barack Obama told guests at a recent fundraiser, scolding members of his own party for under-reacting to Donald Trump’s assault on democracy.

“What I have been surprised by is the degree to which I’ve seen people who, when I was president, or progressives, liberals, stood for all kinds of stuff, who seem like they’re kind of cowed and intimidated and shrinking away from just asserting what they believe, or at least what they said they believe,” he added. “Don’t tell me you’re a Democrat, but you’re kind of disappointed right now, so you’re not doing anything. Don’t say that you care deeply about free speech and then you’re quiet. No, you stand up for free speech when it’s hard. When somebody says something that you don’t like, but you still say, you know what, that person has the right to speak. It is, you know, what’s needed now is courage.”

Reading these remarks last week was simultaneously validating and frustrating. On the one hand, if even Obama is unimpressed with the flagging official opposition to Trump, the rest of us aren’t imagining things. On the other hand… we could use a little more help than this.

It’s become trite, all these years after he left office, to ask “where’s Obama?”—to second-guess his judgments about when to speak publicly and what to say. But suddenly his is more than a missing voice. It’s an inherent vulnerability. A void Trump will fill with FBI agents, congressional subpoenas, perhaps even criminal trials.

Republicans are exploiting Obama’s absence from the partisan fray to enlist the full force of the federal government and American media in a bad-faith scheme to abet Trump’s Jeffrey Epstein coverup.

The easiest way to thwart this scheme would be for Obama to “toughen up” a bit himself. To tell the public what is happening and why it’s wrong.

GRIFT OF GABBARD

Here’s the scheme: ...