Former President Barack Obama seems a bit weirded out by President Donald Trump’s fixation on him.
During an episode of the “All the Smoke” podcast, Obama described Trump’s continual invocation of his name—nearly 10 years after Obama left office—as an “obsession.” (About 28:31 in video above - Ed.)
“I obviously have a room in his head—a suite in his head,” he joked.
Obama went on to note that, during his time as president from 2009 to 2017, “the last thing I had time to do was worry about what somebody said or what my predecessor did.”
“If you’re doing the job right, every day you’ve got five, 10 things that are real hard, and you have to be constantly focused,” he said. “The idea that I’d be worried about somebody who came before and me trying to measure ‘what’s he done today’—constantly worrying about that—is a strange thing to me. It shows me somebody who’s not focused on the American people and the job they’re supposed to do.”
Obama’s observation comes just a few days after Trump defended his ongoing mismanagement of repairs at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool—which caused it to be overrun with algae—by invoking Obama.
“Barack Hussein Obama, have you ever heard of him?” Trump asked reporters, using Obama’s middle name, a staple of racist attacks against the first Black president.
Trump also falsely claimed that Obama and former President Joe Biden spent “over 100 million dollars” on the pool.
Trump similarly demonstrated his Obama fixation a week ago while trying to make his capitulation to Iran sound palatable to domestic and international observers. Trump threw out the nuclear inspection agreement that Obama had secured with Iran, only to later bomb the country—causing casualties and an international fuel crisis.
After negotiating to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Trump insisted that he had negotiated a tougher set of terms with Iran than Obama, which isn’t true.
“And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama, and they said, ‘He’s a stupid son of a bitch,’” Trump said, mischaracterizing past negotiations.
Trump has been obsessed with Obama since he was elected president in 2008. Trump was the most prominent promoter of the racist “birther” conspiracy and was publicly humiliated by Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Recent opinion polling has seen Obama held in much higher public regard than Trump. According to a CNN/SSRS poll released last week, Obama was viewed positively by 57% of Americans, while Trump had just 34% favorability in the same poll.
Obama recently opened his presidential center with a well-attended ceremony, while Trump struggled to attract supporters to a rally in Washington on Wednesday night.
Trump’s racist smears against Obama clearly aren’t helping his popularity—but surely he’ll just blame that on Obama too.
Published with permission of Daily Kos
