Even now, Trump can’t shake his preoccupation with Barack Obama
At a campaign event in North Carolina last month, Donald Trump, for reasons unknown, complained at some length about Barack Obama having won a Nobel Peace Prize. The Republican quickly added, “But I don’t care about that.”
Of course, in context, it was painfully obvious that he did care about that, which is why the former president brought it up unprompted.
A month later, the guy who said he didn’t care about Obama’s Nobel is still talking about it, incorporating this into his closing message with time running out in the 2024 election cycle. The New York Times reported on his latest event in Nevada, and the headline read, “At Las Vegas Rally, Trump Grumbles About Obama’s Nobel Prize.”
On a night when Barack Obama joined Kamala Harris onstage at a star-studded rally in Georgia, Donald J. Trump was smarting on the other side of the country — asking why Mr. Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and not him. … Mr. Trump suggested he was more deserving of the honor than his predecessor in the White House, saying his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, twice for emphasis.
A month after Trump assured an audience that he doesn’t really care about this, it was hard not to notice how much he cared about this. “I got elected in a much bigger, better, crazier election, but they gave him the Nobel Prize,” the GOP nominee added, as if this were relevant.
A day earlier, Trump told an audience that Obama is a “jerk,” and he substantiated the label by pointing to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un for validation.
This came on the heels of Trump telling a Pennsylvania audience that “a lot of people” believe a conspiracy theory that Obama is secretly running the White House — a line the Republican has peddled more than once recently.
Earlier this year, Trump also claimed that Rep. Ronny Jackson, when the Texas Republican was his White House physician, told him that he was in better shape than Obama.
As boasts go, this was, of course, very difficult to believe, but a larger question lurked overhead: Why in the world was Trump talking about this? The answer was that the former president’s obsession with his immediate predecessor has never really gone away.
To be sure, Trump spent much of his White House term fixated on Obama, too, prompting Paul Waldman to ask, “Has there ever been a president who talked so much about the man who preceded him? If so, I’m not aware of it.”
That was in February 2020. Nearly five years later, Obama continues to live rent-free in his successor’s mind.
