Obama just exposed Trump’s absurdities

Chris Stevenson, The Independent

Barack Obama has always been seen by Donald Trump as his bête noire — the man he will always compare himself against politically, and yet the one opponent he can never truly face (so says the US Constitution). The two have been linked politically since 2011, when Trump helped push the conspiracy theory that Obama was not a US citizen, promising millions to charity if someone could convince him that the then-president was born on US soil. A month later, the White House published Obama's long-form birth certificate.

Trump has long claimed he helped settle this specious debate, despite continuing to tweet his suspicions for years. It was an early sign of his default political playbook — ensure something has wide attention, while claiming you don't know the truth or that it is merely something people are talking about. An act that offers the sheen of plausible deniability that in reality is anything but.

While Hillary Clinton was Trump's opponent for the White House in 2016, it was Obama he often had eyes for. He depicted the Obama/Clinton axis (Hillary was Obama’s first secretary of state) as the establishment – despite Trump's own wealth and connections. Playing the political outsider worked, with Obama also choosing to keep his counsel more often than not during Trump's first term, despite growing calls for him to take a stand. This self-imposed silence has loosened in recent years as Trump's grip on the Republican Party has tightened.

For Trump, dismissive of his rivals, Republicans and Democrats alike, Obama stands alone as his true nemesis. Both have had to deal with Iran and an increasingly belligerent and aggressive Russia. History will show that Obama did not always make the right choice, or move as swiftly as he could — but Trump's disregard for cooperation and international standards has its roots in being the antithesis of Obama's White House.

What will rile Trump the most is that this comparison has never been tested at the ballot box; he has never got the chance at the victory he craves. The current incumbent of the White House has so often stood in Obama's shadow; his favourability poll numbers have been much worse for long periods — and still are – and he spent much of his first term having to defend pictures of much sparser crowds at comparable events. In response, Trump has sought to box this shadow, exposing his pettiness and much poorer oratory skills far more often than hitting Obama with valid criticism.

This has been exposed again during the run-up to next week's midterms, with Obama on the road for a tour of rallies competing with Trump to try and shore up the Democrats in key races as they look to try and take back control of the House of Representatives and/or the Senate.

In recent days, in a typical rhetorical flourish, Obama has hit out at Trump's renovations of the White House, saying that the 47th president has added so much gold to the Oval Office that he’s “got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” rather than concentrating on issues that are impacting every American. That jab hit a nerve, with the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accusing Obama of elitism. That is former hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, whose net worth is believed to be around $600 million.

For Obama, the response was simple. Trump's war against Iran, in alliance with Israel, has hit economies around the world, pushing up inflation. "They mobilised a whole-of-government response to that joke — not to inflation, but to that joke,” Obama said during a rally in Georgia last night. "(Trump) is literally doing arts and crafts while we are fighting a war and trying to deal with out-of-control prices.”

Minutes before, in Ohio, Trump defended his renovations, saying that Obama "doesn’t understand cleanliness". We will see which jibe lands more with voters at the ballot box next week, but Obama was no doubt the winner when it came to the level of coverage of each rally overnight. That is Trump's issue. He is still fighting a political foe that does not stand to lose as much as him. One who doesn't need to flood the airwaves to ensure a political attack line lands.

Trump's approval ratings show that he is in a tough political spot; he will have to hope that Obama doesn't help the Democrats land a knockout blow when it comes to control of Congress. As that will be a hit to both Trump's agenda for the next two years and, probably more importantly to the current president, an almighty blow to his ego.