Even years after leaving office, former President Barack Obama remains one of the few figures who can still provoke the current president into a public tirade that blends grievance, mockery, and old campaign talking points into one sprawling outburst.
Obama never directly mentioned President Donald Trump during his appearance on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, but he didn’t have to.
The former president repeatedly alluded to concerns about the current administration, joking about the lowered standards of modern politics. “The bar has changed,” Obama told Colbert, before adding, “I think that you could perform significantly better than some folks that we’ve seen.”
Obama also warned against using the Justice Department as a political weapon. He argued that presidents should avoid turning public office into personal business ventures.
“The idea is that the attorney general is the people’s lawyer,” Obama said. “It’s not the president’s consigliere.”
Days later, Trump responded by reviving one of his favorite political battlefields: the Iran nuclear deal. Right before dismissing Iran’s latest response to the White House peace proposal as “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE,” Trump unloaded on Obama over the former administration’s handling of Tehran.
“Iran has been playing games with the United States, and the rest of the World, for 47 years (DELAY, DELAY, DELAY!),” Trump wrote Sunday, before arguing that Iran “finally hit ‘pay dirt'” when Obama entered office.
Trump claimed Obama “was not only good to them, he was great, actually going to their side, jettisoning Israel, and all other Allies, and giving Iran a major and very powerful new lease on life.”
He then attacked the $1.7 billion cash settlement paid to Iran in 2016, a payment stemming from a decades-old dispute tied to undelivered military equipment purchased before the 1979 revolution, representing the return of Iranian funds plus accumulated interest.
Trump portrayed it differently.
“Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and 1.7 Billion Dollars in green cash, flown into Tehran, was handed to them on a silver platter,” Trump wrote. “Every Bank in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland was emptied out, It was so much money that when it arrived, the Iranian Thugs had no idea what to do with it.”
He continued: “They finally found the greatest SUCKER of them all, in the form of a weak and stupid American President.”
Trump added, “He was a disaster as our ‘Leader,’ but not as bad as Sleepy Joe Biden!”
The internet was quick to connect the dots.
“Obama pissed him off. It was the interview with Colbert. Such a thin-skinned snowflake,” one user wrote on X.
Another added: “The Trump Admin knows its base. Reality doesn’t matter as long as you’re attacking Obama, Biden, or the Clintons.”
Then it escalated. On Monday night, Trump shared 55 posts in the span of one hour. Seventeen of them targeted Obama. Among the posts was a claim that Obama and U.S. intelligence agencies carried out a coordinated effort to undermine Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He accused Obama-era officials of running secret operations, using foreign intelligence allies, and allegedly sending undercover agents into the campaign. The post called the alleged actions “bigger than Watergate” and demanded arrests and prosecutions for treason and sedition.
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“He really cannot stand that no one actually likes him the way people genuinely like Obama,” one critic wrote in response.
But here is where critics say the alarm bells start ringing.Trump has been convicted on 34 felony counts. When prosecutors came after him, Trump fought the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled presidents have absolute immunity for actions tied to their core constitutional powers. The court also ruled presidents have broad protection for official acts taken while serving in office. However, the ruling said presidents are not immune from prosecution for unofficial or private actions.
Trump now wants to use that same justice system to jail his predecessor for treason.
The contradiction was not lost on critics. Trump spent years in court arguing that a president should be immune from prosecution. Now, he’s demanding that a former president be arrested. He built his legal defense around the idea that pursuing a sitting or former president in court is a dangerous weaponization of justice. He is now calling for exactly that.
Another put it more bluntly: “The Trump Admin knows its base. Reality doesn’t matter as long as you’re attacking Obama, Biden, or the Clintons.”
