Former President Donald Trump has been claiming that former President Barack Obama is secretly still in control of the White House. On Monday in New Hampshire, he explicitly said it via NBC News.
“It’s never been worse than it is now under crooked Joe Biden and, frankly, his boss, Barack Hussein Obama,” Trump told a crowd of hundreds at a campaign stop. “I think it’s his boss.”
Well, a 2020 video of Obama on late-night television circulated in conservative corners of the internet this fall, showing him deadpanning to late-night TV host Stephen Colbert that in an ideal world, he would have a stand-in with an earpiece so he could deliver lines and stay out of the spotlight.
It has been noted that there has never been any evidence to suggest Obama has more influence over the current White House beyond providing suggestions or offering help at an occasional meeting with Biden. Reporting since the Obama presidency has painted a more complicated and cooler picture of the Obama-Biden relationship than the “bromance” lauded during their days as ticket-mates.
But the general notion that someone else is in charge percolated in Trump’s speeches in recent weeks, until he fully adopted the premise in New Hampshire.
“I don’t believe he’s smart enough to be doing this stuff,” Trump said about Biden at an Iowa campaign stop on Oct. 1. “I believe it’s the people that are surrounding him,” he said, alluding to the idea that other decision-makers are operating in the background.
Less than a week later, Trump implied that Biden was not really the president as he discussed then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s handling of budget negotiations.
“I don’t ever think he knows what’s going on,” Trump said of Biden in an interview with the conservative political commentator John Solomon. “I said Kevin … I think this is the president’s, whoever the president is, it’s not yours,” he said, recalling a conversation he said he had with McCarthy about who should be taking responsibility for budget negotiations.
On Monday, Trump seemed to answer his own question. Suggesting the possibility of a third world war at his Wolfeboro campaign event, he said, “This is obliteration, and Obama has plenty to do with it.”
“Obama has plenty to deal with. I call him, I call him Biden’s boss,” he said.
