Washington: There’s something about the presence of a foreign leader in the Oval Office that spurs Donald Trump into territory that is, even for him, extreme.

On Tuesday (Wednesday AEST), it was the Philippines’ President Ferdinand Marcos Jr who bore witness to a stunning display of temerity as the US president accused one of his predecessors, Barack Obama, of trying to engineer a coup and committing “treason”.

Donald Trump meets Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr in the Oval Office of the White House on Tuesday.Credit: AP

The allegation, spurious as it is, arises from a document compiled by Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, alleging a “treasonous conspiracy” by senior Obama administration officials in 2016 to wrongly assert that Russia interfered in the presidential election of that year, which Trump won.

In short, the dossier suggests intelligence officials changed their findings under political pressure from Obama and others, and embraced the narrative that Vladimir Putin’s regime tried to swing the vote for Trump.

The 11-page memo disingenuously conflates different findings. Officials never alleged a Russian operation to hack voting systems; they did, however, come to the view that........

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