Former President Barack Obama criticized President Donald Trump’s relentless “obsession” with him and his family on Wednesday, suggesting that it’s a sign that the current leader “is not focused on the American people.”
“First of all, when I was president, the last thing I had time to do was worry about what somebody said or my predecessor did. They’re gone. I’ve got work to do.” Obama said on the “All The Smoke” podcast.
“The idea that I’d be worrying about somebody who came before and me trying to measure like, ‘What’s he done today?’ Look, constantly worrying about that is a strange thing to me,” he continued. “It shows me somebody who is not focused on the American people and the job they’re supposed to do.”
The former president has faced a barrage of insults and offensive remarks from Trump, especially in the current president’s second term, where he recently dropped profanity about Obama during a meltdown over the Iran deal and slammed his presidential library design with AI slop.
Earlier this year Obama called out MAGA’s “deeply troubling” behavior after a racist video depicting him and his wife as apes was shared on Trump’s Truth Social account.
The video was taken down, but Trump refused to apologize for sharing the video in the first place.
Podcast co-host Matt Barnes prefaced his question to Obama by saying, “The leader of this current administration is still very fascinated with you and your family, constantly bringing you guys up, and you’ve been out of office nearly 10 years now.”
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“How do you continue to keep your cool and take the high road, so to speak, because we asked Michelle [Obama], and Michelle said we don’t have to take the high road no more,” Barnes asked, praising Obama for meeting “the negativity and the racism with class.”
“You don’t just want to cuss his ass out, sometimes?” Barnes asked.
The former president told Barnes, “You’ve gotta ask him what it is —” before the co-host interjected.
“The obsession,” Barnes said.
“The obsession,” Obama agreed. “I obviously have a room in his head. A suite in his head.”
He told the former NBA star that “if you’re doing the job right every day, you’ve got five, ten things that are real hard, and you have to be constantly focused.”
Obama added that early in his presidency, he learned “to screen out the noise, in order for you to understand what’s in front of you and deal with it well.”
“It’s like if you are constantly worrying about what other people think, somebody can have a bad day and cuss you out, and suddenly controlling your performance, it’s controlling your thought processes,” Obama said. “So, I screen that stuff out pretty early on, and I ain’t worrying about it. Another way of putting it is no reason to dignify that kind of stuff.”