Why Barack Obama is the ghost haunting Donald Trump’s presidency
Why does Donald Trump still talk about Barack Obama as if he were a sitting president rather than a retired one? Why does Obama’s name surface whenever Trump is cornered by failure, scandal or history itself?
The answer is not found in policy disputes or party politics. It lies in something older and more corrosive. Trump’s fixation with Obama is a personal grievance elevated into a political worldview.
This is not rivalry. It is a wound.
The story begins not in the Oval Office but in a ballroom. In 2011, at the White House Correspondents Dinner, Obama punctured Trump’s self-importance with a few lines of deadpan humour.
He mocked Trump’s birther theatrics and his reality television pretensions before an audience Trump desperately wanted to impress. The laughter was polite. The humiliation was not. Trump’s face hardened. He has been replaying that moment ever since.
Political psychologist Jerrold Post, a former CIA profiler who spent decades studying authoritarian personalities, once observed that for narcissistic leaders humiliation is not processed, it is avenged.
Trump’s political trajectory reads like a case study written in real time. He did not enter politics with a governing philosophy. He entered with a grievance.
The birther campaign was his opening act. Trump’s insistence that Obama was not truly American was never a good faith constitutional concern. It was an attempt to strip Obama of legitimacy and reassert a racial and cultural hierarchy Obama’s presidency had unsettled.
Even after Obama released his long-form birth certificate, Trump persisted. Facts were irrelevant. The accusation itself was the weapon: “You do not belong here.”
Defenders sometimes argue that Trump merely amplified doubts already circulating. That misses the point. Trump chose this lie because it resonated with a deeper anxiety among those who felt displaced by Obama’s ascent.
He gave megaphone volume to an unspoken fear that power was slipping away from people who believed it was theirs by birthright.
Historian Timothy Snyder has warned that when truth becomes optional, authoritarianism follows close behind. His phrase, “post-truth is pre-fascism”, captures the broader significance of Trump’s birther crusade.
The attack on Obama was also an attack on evidence, institutions and shared reality. It trained millions to accept assertion over proof and grievance over governance. Obama was the target. Democracy was the casualty.
Obama’s very presence violated Trump’s mythology of power. Trump believes success should be inherited, loudly branded and relentlessly performed. Gold, spectacle and intimidation are his currencies.
Obama arrived without any of that. No dynasty. No towers. No tabloid persona. He won the presidency twice through coalition-building, rhetorical discipline and an ability to make voters feel included in a shared project. He wielded power quietly.
That kind of authority is Trump’s nightmare. It cannot be bullied, bought or branded into submission.
This contrast shaped Trump’s presidency. His obsession with dismantling Obama’s legacy bordered on ritual. He withdrew from the Paris climate agreement not because he had a superior environmental vision but because Obama had signed it.
He tore up the Iran nuclear deal despite lacking a replacement. He vowed endlessly to repeal Obamacare without ever producing a workable alternative.
These were not policy disagreements. They were acts of symbolic destruction. If Obama built it, Trump had to smash it, even if nothing coherent replaced it.
Supporters often describe this as routine ideological reversal. But that explanation collapses under scrutiny. Previous presidents have revised policies. Trump sought to erase symbols.
His fixation was not with outcomes but with undoing the man who embodied a standard he could not meet.
The same psychology surfaced in Trump’s peculiar obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama was awarded the prize in 2009, early in his presidency, a decision that itself attracted debate and criticism.
Trump seized on that controversy obsessively. He complained repeatedly that Obama did not deserve it. He insisted, often unprompted, that he was the one who did.
He floated himself as a candidate for peace in the Middle East, on the Korean peninsula, anywhere a headline could be harvested. This was not about diplomacy. It was about parity. Obama had a Nobel. Trump wanted one too.
The fixation revealed something raw. Trump does not merely want achievements. He wants trophies that validate his sense of superiority over Obama. The Nobel represents global recognition, moral stature and historical legitimacy, all things Trump craves but cannot manufacture.
That Obama received it, however prematurely some may argue, remains a psychic irritant Trump cannot dislodge. It is another mirror reflecting a gap he cannot close.
This dynamic also helps explain why episodes like the circulation of imagery depicting the Obamas as apes provoke such intense reaction and why they cannot be brushed aside as mere provocation or equal opportunity satire.
In Western racial history, comparing black people to apes is not neutral mockery. It is one of the oldest tools of dehumanisation, used to justify slavery, segregation and exclusion by casting black humanity as something less than fully human.
When the first black president and his family are depicted in that way, the image taps into a deep reservoir of historical violence and denial of belonging.
Pointing out that white figures are also depicted as beasts in the same video does not cancel that meaning. Context matters. A white politician portrayed as a pig or a wolf does not carry centuries of racial pseudo-science behind it.
The insult may be crude or offensive, but it does not echo a tradition of denying an entire group’s humanity. In the case of the Obamas, the imagery reinforces the same logic that powered birtherism itself – “you are not one of us, you are something else”.
That is why such depictions land not as satire but as continuation.
There is also a deeper psychological contrast Trump cannot escape. Obama’s power lies in composure. He pauses. He listens. He allows silence to do the work.
Trump fears silence. He fills it with noise, insult and escalation. In a culture addicted to spectacle, restraint reads as confidence. Trump’s bluster reads as anxiety. Every time Obama appears unruffled, Trump looks exposed.
Writer Ta Nehisi Coates once observed that Obama carried himself with an ease that made others tell on themselves. That ease was not passivity. It was control.
Against it, Trump’s performative masculinity looks frantic. The louder Trump becomes, the more Obama’s calm functions as an indictment.
Even out of office, Obama continues to haunt Trump. When protests erupted after George Floyd’s murder, Trump blamed Obama. When the coronavirus pandemic spiralled out of control, Trump blamed Obama.
When courts blocked him, when advisers leaked, when crowds disappointed him, Obama’s name resurfaced. This is not accountability. It is projection. Trump invokes Obama because Obama represents a legitimacy Trump has never secured and never will.
History is equally unforgiving. Obama left office peacefully, respected by allies and adversaries alike. He did not contest the election that replaced him. He did not incite violence.
Trump attempted to overturn an election he lost and encouraged a mob to storm the Capitol. Obama writes books and builds institutions. Trump fumes on social media and stages rallies of grievance. One understands power as stewardship. The other treats it as entitlement.
At its core, Trump’s obsession with Obama reflects a backlash against an America that is changing. Obama’s presidency did not end racism or inequality, but it shattered the illusion that the highest office belonged to a single type of citizen.
His election symbolised a widening of the national circle. Trump’s politics are a revolt against that widening. His slogan is not a programme but a lament. Make America Great Again is an admission that the present no longer belongs to him.
Obama once remarked that progress in America has always come from widening the circle of belonging. That idea terrifies Trump. For him, inclusion feels like loss. Equality feels like erasure. Obama’s presidency made that anxiety visible and irreversible.
Trump needs Obama as an enemy because resentment requires an object. Without Obama, Trump’s narrative collapses. There is no humiliation to avenge, no benchmark to resent, no mirror to smash. Obama is that mirror. In it, Trump sees everything he lacks and everything he cannot buy.
This is why the obsession will not fade. Trump is not fighting Obama the man. He is fighting what Obama represents. A legitimacy grounded in consent rather than coercion. A confidence rooted in discipline rather than noise. A vision of power that does not require Trump at its centre.
Trump does not hate Obama because of policy differences. He hates him because Obama proved that power can exist without Trump’s permission, Trump’s approval or Trump’s applause. And that is a truth Trump will spend the rest of his political life trying and failing to outrun.
Gabriel Manyati is a Zimbabwean journalist and analyst delivering incisive commentary on politics, human interest stories, and current affairs.
