By Nia-Malika Henderson / Bloomberg Opinion
It is both sad and unsurprising that President Trump posted a deepfake video of former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office. Battling for position with his MAGA base, which is furious over his inaction on the so-called Epstein files, Trump has resorted to an old tactic: distraction. He has raised another conspiracy theory to change the subject away from a different conspiracy theory.
But in sharing the video, which was created by another user, he is sinking to a new low, even for the president who encouraged crowds to chant “Lock her up!” about his 2016 political opponent and has repeatedly smeared the “Biden crime family.”
But no political rival seems to capture Trump’s imagination like Obama. The apparently AI-generated video depicts FBI agents forcing Obama to the ground as Trump looks on in the Oval Office and the song “YMCA” plays in the background. Later, Obama is portrayed in an orange jumpsuit sitting in a jail cell, a MAGA fantasy made “real.”
For Trump, the video is a return to a theme that helped him break through with the conspiracy-minded Tea Party voters who would become his base. Then, it was birtherism. Now it is fake Obama being fake arrested. The throughline is that Obama, the nation’s first Black president, is somehow illegitimate.
Trump’s renewed attack got a boost this weekend from allegations made by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, about the Obama administration. Gabbard, who has been on rocky ground with Trump, alleged without evidence Sunday on Fox News that there was a “treasonous conspiracy … directed by President Obama” that sought to inflate claims around Russian interference in the 2016 election. Gabbard said she plans to make a criminal referral to the Department of Justice based on documents released on Friday.
Democrats have dismissed Gabbard’s claims, intended for an audience of one, as a baseless lie. But for Trump’s most committed voters, it’s more like a callback to Trump Season 1. One of Trump’s biggest falsehoods about Obama came early in his first term when he falsely claimed that Obama had engaged in “Nixon/Watergate” scandal by wiretapping him at Trump Tower. “Bad (or sick) guy!” he alleged without producing evidence to support his claims.
Trump’s obsession with Obama dates back even further, to 2011, when Obama belittled and humiliated Trump at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, reportedly triggering his desire to seek the White House as an act of revenge.
“Donald Trump’s fantasy is to be the guy who takes the key to the Oval office from Barack Obama’s hand in 2017 and it’s personal,” author Michael D’Antonio told the PBS show “Frontline” in a 2016 documentary called “The Choice 2016.” “This is a burning, personal need that he has to redeem himself from being humiliated by the first Black president,” D’Antonio continued.
But Trump’s fantasy is also to be like Obama, who is tall and thin, telegenic, 16 years younger, adored by celebrities and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
To even the scales, Trump seeks the symbolic and substantive erasure of all things Obama, from his signature legislative achievement — the Affordable Care Act — to his signature rhetorical move: emphasizing all that Americans have in common.
“What a divider he is,” Trump said about Obama in October 2024, in a variation of comments he’s made multiple times. “He divides this country. He couldn’t care less.”
And of course, Trump insisted in the days after he was sworn in the first time that he had the biggest crowds of any previous president, a falsehood directed at Obama’s historic draw.
Obama left office with a 59 percent approval rating and hit a high of 69 percent when he first took office, according to Gallup. And historians in a recent survey ranked Obama as the seventh-best president.
Trump, ranked as the worst president by those same historians, will never have such standing. His highest approval rating was 49 percent in the “honeymoon” phase of his first term. Trump left office at 34 percent, according to Gallup and his current numbers are similar.
Trump’s Obama complex has largely been met with a shrug by the former president, who has barely engaged with Trump outside of campaign cycles. His most viral burn came in August, when he took a locker-room-level barb at Trump’s obsession with crowd size.
Occasionally, the two are brought face-to-face by external events, as happened in January, when Trump and Obama were seated next to each other at President Jimmy Carter’s funeral.
Trump looked like a kid in a candy store.
“I didn’t realize it, how friendly it looked. I saw it on your wonderful network, just a little while ago, before I came in. And I said, ‘Boy, they look like two people [who] like each other.’ And we probably do,” Trump said at the time on Fox News. “We have a little different philosophies, right? But we probably do. I don’t know, we just got along.” (Don’t tell MAGA.)
According to a new book, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, Trump used the moment to ask Obama to join him for a golf outing at one of his courses.
Nia-Malika Henderson is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former senior political reporter for CNN and the Washington Post, she has covered politics and campaigns for almost two decades. ©2025 Bloomberg L.P., bloomberg.com/opinion.
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