by Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann
Every few months, a sanitized report appears on the post-presidency activities of Barack Obama’s public advocacy. It’s a narrative that conveniently ignores the inherent problems in having a person with no constitutional role or congressional oversight take an active role in executive decision-making.
Over the summer of 2024, Obama emerged as a central figure in government censorship of the internet while launching a new campaign against gun ownership. In earlier times, the spectacle of an ex-president leading simultaneous campaigns against the First and Second Amendments might have generated some interest in the legacy media. But as last week’s election coverage proved, the press is no longer interested in reporting hard facts or maintaining transparency. The mockingbird media are now servants of those holding power and will do anything to advance their interests.
Yet there is another interpretation of Obama’s peculiar involvement with Democrat operatives during the Trump and Biden administrations. It is that Obama was never the leader of anything, neither then nor now.
Post-presidency, Obama was fixated on collecting laundered wealth from intermediaries such as Spotify and Netflix, buying luxury properties, and hanging out on private yachts with celebrities. His stratospheric levels of egotism and absence of self-awareness motivated him to occasionally appear in public next to Biden as a larger, more popular figure, signaling that he was “The One” who was calling the shots. We know this to be completely false.
Obama has proven to be a celebrity-obsessed, pretend billionaire with the lazy pretense of having any positive influence whatsoever on the inner workings of the American government. He has presented himself as a self-consumed lightweight who was breathtakingly narcissistic even by Washington, D.C., standards.
Floating to the Top on a Cloud of Projection
Obama’s lack of managerial experience and his thin understanding of important issues did not matter — Democrats wanted a malleable figure as the leader of the Free World who could speak decisively, travel the world repeating leftist platitudes convincingly off a teleprompter, and sign anything put in front of him.
What Democrats failed to comprehend was that the projection of their beliefs onto a relatively unknown, singular person was to create a figure that would ultimately destroy their party in ways they did not anticipate. Obama’s far-left beliefs, his antipathy toward America, and his racial divisiveness were somewhat hidden at first, yet became quite obvious as he was put on a pedestal by Democrats who were blinded by his charm.
Nowhere was this more evident than after Kamala Harris was installed as the candidate. The failure of his vice presidential understudy, Joe Biden, was pushed aside after the disastrous first presidential debate where he seemed dazed and confused. Democrat power brokers, specifically Obama along with Nancy Pelosi, knew there was no way that Biden could defeat Donald Trump in November.
What they didn’t count on was Biden immediately endorsing his vice president. Obama and Pelosi didn’t see that move coming. As a result, politically, they got caught completely flat-footed. It was wonderful for all of us on the right to watch and as much as any political move in 2024, it ensured Harris’s and the Democrats’ stunning defeat.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has observed presidential politics from the moment Obama was sworn in on January 20, 2009, to last week’s election. The cult of personality surrounding Obama prevented the damage from being seen in its entirety until well after Obama’s second term. His radicalism, hatred of America and Israel, and his tendency to be attracted to wealth and fame compromised his presidency and explained how the Democrat Party lurched so far to the left and alienated a large portion of its moderate base.
Obama’s fascination with billionaires led to an emerging oligarchy, especially in the tech sector, tightening its grip on the government at large. His penchant for “settling scores” resulted in the weaponization of nearly every government agency against American citizens. Race relations were set back to the 1950s. Inequality skyrocketed. The Tea Party emerged. Donald Trump was elected. “Russiagate” was born. The Democrat-supporting legacy media began its sudden decline in viewership and readership. It all started with Obama in the White House, continued through Trump’s first presidency, and the sham of what was the Biden-Harris administration. Biden’s cognitive decline was hidden from America until it was too late.
Looking back through the prism of history, the Obama years didn’t end well for Democrats. When Obama took office in 2008, Democrats held 55 Senate seats and 256 seats in the House. After Obama’s second term ended in 2016, Democrats had lost nine seats in the Senate and 62 seats in the House. There were twelve fewer Democrat governors, with Democrats overall holding fewer elected offices nationwide at any time since the 1920s.
For all the platitudes of his political intellect and savvy manner of operation, Obama has been a down-ballot disaster for Democrats. But it has been a goldmine for Obama, who is now in his fourth mansion. We have to wonder how anyone in the Democrat Party thinks they got their money’s worth with Obama.
It’s not hard to see how rewarding this was for Obama. He knew that division and racial strife were the path to electoral victory for the left. By reigniting animosities and weaponizing the federal government against his political opponents, a process that intensified during the Biden administration, Obama took extreme, unprecedented measures to achieve short-term gains and position himself as the central figure in Democrat political circles.
He wanted fame, fortune, adulation, worship, and no accountability. He achieved all of that and more, becoming the de facto “kingmaker” of the Democrat Party.
What exactly were the motives of Democrats when they elevated a junior senator from Illinois to be the central figure of their party? To answer that question, one must understand the criminal enterprise that Washington, D.C., has become over six decades and the need for an effective frontman to charm the population. Bill Clinton served that purpose quite well for two terms after being elevated similarly.
But Obama was an unknown entity with far fewer accomplishments than Clinton. Obama was the DEI-approved face of the Democrat machine that could operate with near impunity, reflexively branding any attempt to resist or criticize him as racist. A political and racial arsonist to his core, Obama scorched the earth at every opportunity and dared anyone to challenge him. It was the most destructive and divisive presidential period in modern history.
Obama utilized the radicalism that was honed during his time as a “community organizer” in Chicago and applied it to the nation. He engineered conflict, caused chaos, and pitted people against each other. It was the classic Marxist notion of “oppressor versus oppressed,” where winners and losers, villains and heroes, innocence and guilt, are unilaterally determined. People were labeled, vilified, categorized, and ostracized from society simply by their beliefs. Violence against them was justified and even celebrated.
Democrats were genuinely “riding the tiger” with Obama and were unsure exactly where he would lead them. Well, here we are — a nation completely divided, at each other’s throats, leveling hyperbolic charges against strangers, all because we had to have the equivalent of a DEI hire in the White House to assuage our “racial strife.” And how is that “racial strife” going today?
More to the point, “How are the Democrats doing today with Obama as their de facto leader?” Horribly, as the 2024 election has proven.
The ironic aspect of this will be missed by many. Obama rose to power in 2008 because the 18- to 25-year-old Millennials believed in his stature as the Black Jesus. In 2024, the 18- to 25-year-old Gen-Zs abandoned him because they don’t.
With the electoral drubbing Democrats took last week, with recriminations on who to blame being spread across Democrat circles, Obama’s political “brilliance” has been revealed as pure fiction. You can say that the mask has been ripped off with the presidency and both Houses of Congress now in Republican hands.
Trump is moving at lightning speed to fill his cabinet with people who hold dear his populist message. Trump went through this game eight years ago and has a clearer picture of how the sausage is made in the D.C. swamp. And with a clear mandate from voters, he knows he has at least two years to fix the mess with the economy and at the border that he’s inherited from Biden (with plenty of help from the puppet master pulling his strings from the shadows in what has turned out to be the third term of Obama’s presidency).
Key to Trump’s success — and if he can retain control of the House and Senate in the 2026 midterms — will be to bring the warring parties in Ukraine and Russia as well as the Middle East to the negotiating tables, and at the same time fix the damage to the economy wrought by Biden, Harris, and Democrats in Congress. If he does, it will cement his legacy while at the same time, likely ending Obama’s influence and interference in American politics once and for all.
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Richard Truesdell is a former consumer electronics retail executive and automotive travel photojournalist. In the last 25 years, he has visited more than 35 countries on six continents. A former high school history teacher with a BA in Political Science from Waynesburg University, he is a lifelong Conservative moderate who has turned his thoughts and keyboard to political commentary and popular culture. A cross-section of his writings can be found here.
Keith Lehmann is a retired consumer electronics industry executive who has written extensively on technology, transportation, and international travel. Living in Southern California for over fifty years, he has first-hand exposure to societal and cultural happenings of the left and submits decidedly realism-based, Conservative viewpoints, much of which can be found on his Substack.
