Houseguests and fish begin to smell after three days, as the saying goes. But ex-presidents who stay in Washington, D.C., reek almost immediately.

In the history of the republic, former presidents have had the decency to get out of town rather than loom over their successor. The two exceptions appear to be Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama. Wilson, however, has the excuse that he was practically bedridden and expired within three years. Obama has no excuse at all.

Obama cannot stand being out of the spotlight. During his second term, instead of focusing on building the Democratic Party, he created his own political organization. Before it flopped, he raised millions, diverting resources and organizing away from his party. This is a supposed political genius, yet his decisions opened a path to victory for Trump.

Obama will not and cannot come to grips with this fact, even to this day.

Trump was elected by disaffected Obama voters. When you compare the 2012 and 2016 exit polls and county-by-county results, what stands out are defection and disaffection — defection of Obama voters to Trump and disaffection toward Obama’s chosen successor, Hillary Clinton.

Between the 2012 and 2016 elections, Clinton dropped by nearly 3 points in the popular vote from Obama. Trump fell by just 1 point from Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Among voters with a household income under $100,000, Trump improved by 1 point over Romney, whereas Clinton fell by 5 points. With union voters, Trump improved by 2 points and Clinton fell by 7 points.

More importantly, Trump jumped by 5 points with voters who had a high school education or less, whereas Clinton dropped by 7 points.

Even young voters walked away from the Democratic ticket. Trump did not improve on Romney with the youngest demographic, but Clinton fell by 5 points from Obama’s 2012 performance.

If Clinton, who received Obama’s early endorsement and ran supporting his policies, had held on to just half of those defectors, she would have won.

After four years of Trump and four years of Obama’s former vice president (and an administration stuffed with Obama alums and acolytes), the electorate looks even worse. Many, many Obama voters abandoned Democrats. The 2024 exit polls showed Trump rising to 45 percent with union households, 5 points over Romney. Trump won 51 percent with households earning less than $100,000 (up 8 points); and 62 percent with those earning a high school education or less (up 16 points).

And what about the “youth vote,” with whom Obama thought he has a special connection? Well, those 18-29s in 2012 are now 30-44. That age cohort went from Obama at plus-13 points in 2012 to Kamala Harris at a mere plus-4 points. In other words, Trump jumped by 9 to 10 points with Obama’s “special friends.”

It is hard to figure out what Obama is really thinking; tightly controlled as ever, and only sitting for sycophantic interviews, he seldom reveals anything of real interest. But his actions point to a man out of touch and befogged by his own delusions of genius.

How Obama handled the implosion of Joe Biden is a study in political malpractice. In interviews over their new book, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” authors Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen paint a poor picture of the former president.

According to Parnes and Allen, Obama mounted a campaign to shunt Kamala Harris aside in some ersatz quickie primary, which he probably thought he could control. But there’s opinion and there’s political reality. The reality is and was (recognized far in advance) that pushing Harris aside was always a fool’s errand.

From the day she became vice president, Harris was the prohibitive favorite to be the next nominee. The idea that any VP could be passed over — much less the first black woman to serve as VP — was crazy. Only if Harris was going to meekly accept the lofty judgement of Obama would that work, and why would she do that?

Yes, she’s not that great a politician. But there are not exactly a ton of all-stars in the Democratic Party. According to Parnes and Allen, Obama was thinking that the next ticket should be Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He seemed to think that these little-experienced, unfamiliar pols were going to blitz Harris and grab the nomination.

The fact that the mediocre Harris easily sunk this buffoonish plan shows how truly weak it was.

The effort to supplant Harris may well signal the last hurrah for Obama having real power in the Democratic Party. Despite all the disrespect from the national media and the political establishment, Kamala Harris is the real leader of the Democrats today — at least, she is the absolute favorite to be the 2028 nominee, if she wants it.

Harris still polls very strong, with essentially 100 percent name recognition among Democrats and 82 percent approval with liberal voters (80 percent with Democrats), easily ahead of any of her putative rivals. And Harris has a ready-made excuse for losing in 2024: she was stuck with Biden hanging around and his awful campaign apparatus.

Harris will lead in the Democratic polls at least through the first Democratic primary in 2028. If she holds on and gets the nomination, she might play nice with Obama in order to win, but you can bet her team will put him in the freezer if she wins.

It is true Obama enjoys high ratings in comparison to past presidents. But that popularity is little more than nostalgia. Obama has clearly lost his political touch. The nation’s politics has moved on. It is past time for Obama to pack his bags and leave town.

White House Moves Obama Portrait to Make Room for New One of Trump

While the shuffling of artwork in the president’s residence drew criticism, that kind of rotation is common with the change of administrations.

The unveiling of former President Barack Obama’s official portrait in the East Room of the White House in 2022.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

 

The Trump administration said on Friday that it had moved a portrait of former President Barack Obama in a White House hallway and replaced it with a pop-art painting of President Trump pumping his fist after the assassination attempt last year on the campaign trail in Butler, Pa.

The shuffling of décor is not uncommon at the White House, where portraits are rotated often. But the new, striking artwork depicting Mr. Trump drew criticism from some presidential historians, who could not recall another president hanging a painting of himself during his term in the White House.

Typically, paintings of presidents and first ladies are hung in the White House after they have left office, historians said.

A spokesman for Mr. Obama declined to comment.

The portrait of Mr. Obama, which was unveiled in the East Room during the administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., shows the former president in a dark suit and silver tie, standing with his hands in his pockets. The background is white; the portrait was based on photographs taken by the artist Robert McCurdy.

The new painting shows Mr. Trump embraced by a team of Secret Service agents as an American flag billows in a cloudless blue sky behind him. Streaks of red run across his face.

Image

The artwork depicts a scene similar to still images taken after a would-be assassin fired at Mr. Trump, hitting him in his ear, during a campaign speech in Pennsylvania in July. The words uttered by a defiant Mr. Trump after the shooting — “Fight! Fight! Fight!” — became a rally cry for his supporters.

The painting of Mr. Trump is on a wall opposite from Mr. Obama’s, the White House said, adding that Mr. Trump’s was placed in the spot for the newest presidential portrait.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that the “executive mansion is the president’s home, and he has the right to make changes as other presidents have in the past.”

“President Trump decided to temporarily display this painting, which represents a pivotal moment in history when he nearly lost his life,” she added. “Only The New York Times would find a problem with this.”

Ted Widmer, a presidential historian at the City University of New York and a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, said he was surprised to see the new artwork.

“It just seems tacky,” Mr. Widmer said. “It feels different from our tradition of venerating the distinguished holders of the office from both parties — and going in a new direction of walking around looking at images of yourself all day long.”

But Julian E. Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton, said the move fit into a pattern.

“In the second term, it’s not just winning the White House,” Mr. Zelizer said of Mr. Trump. “He’s always had intense animosity for President Obama, all the way back to the early 2010s. And I think this time around, he really wants to show that he has — in his mind — supplanted him.”

Barbara A. Perry, a presidential studies professor at the University of Virginia, said she found the style of the painting, with blood on Mr. Trump’s face, particularly “odd.”

“Can you imagine Gerald Ford having a portrait painted of himself ducking?” Ms. Perry said of an assassination attempt against Ford, the 38th president, in 1975. She added, “This would be viewed as lacking in taste in days gone by.”

 

Obama and Harris publicly rebuke Trump’s second-term actions

Former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday each delivered remarks on the state of the country under President Donald Trump’s second term and criticized the administration’s recent actions.

Obama, who preceded Trump’s first term, sharply criticized Trump’s efforts to reshape the federal government, crackdown on immigration and dissent, and intimidate news outlets and the legal establishment.

“So, this is the first time I’ve been speaking publicly for a while,” Obama said during an on-stage interview at Hamilton College. “I’ve been watching for a little bit.”

“Imagine if I had done any of this,” Obama said, later adding: “It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me, or a whole bunch of my predecessors.”

Obama went on to say that he doesn’t think Trump’s new tariff announcement “is going to be good for America.” However, he said that he is more concerned with what he described as the White House’s infringement of rights.

“I’m more deeply concerned with a federal government that threatens universities if they don’t give up students who are exercising their right to free speech,” Obama told the crowd of college students. “The idea that a White House can say to law firms, if you represent parties that we don’t like, we’re going to pull all our business or bar you from representing people effectively. Those kinds of – that kind of behavior is contrary to the basic compact we have as Americans.”

Obama had previously warned of the dangers facing the country if Trump were reelected, while campaigning for Harris during the final stretch of the 2024 presidential race. “Just because (Trump) acts goofy,” the former president said at the time, “doesn’t mean his presidency wouldn’t be dangerous.”

In separate remarks, Harris on Thursday said Trump’s moves since he returned to office were largely predictable.

“There were many things we knew would happen,” Harris said in a video of her remarks at the Leading Women Defined Summit. “I’m not here to say I told you so,” she added before laughing.

Harris said she recognizes that Trump’s return to the Oval Office has created “a great sense of fear.”

“We are seeing organizations stay quiet. We are seeing those who are capitulating to clearly unconstitutional threats. And these are the things that we are witnessing, each day in the last few months in our country and it understandably creates a great sense of fear,” Harris said.

Earlier this week, Trump announced a deal with the law firm that employs former second gentleman Doug Emhoff – Willkie Farr & Gallagher – which the president said includes the firm agreeing to provide at least $100 million in pro bono legal services throughout his second term. It was another example of high-profile firms cutting deals with the White House as Trump has targeted firms that have done work with his perceived political enemies.

Before the Willkie agreement was announced, Emhoff addressed the matter saying, “The rule of law is under attack. Democracy is under attack. And so, all of us lawyers need to do what we can to push back on that.”

Harris’ Thursday remarks, video of which were first reported by MSNBC, are her most direct comments since the start of Trump’s second term.

The former vice president, who lost to Trump in the November election, went on to say that while fear is “contagious,” so is courage.

“Fear has a way of being contagious. When one person has fear, it has a way of spreading to those around them and spreading. And we are witnessing that, no doubt,” Harris said at the gathering of female leaders of color.

“But I say this also, my dear friends, courage is also contagious,” she added.

I Thought the Michelle and Barack Obama Divorce Rumors Were Bunk—Until I Heard That Interview

Michelle Obama has finally said something about the divorce rumors that have been plaguing the Obamas over the past few months, but in the process, she may have created more questions than answers. Such as: How random is it that her chosen venue for breaking her silence was One Tree Hill actress Sophia Bush’s podcast, such that now news outlets like the New York Times are having to cite Sophia Bush? But also: For a person who’s ostensibly shutting down breakup speculation, why didn’t she sound more convincing?

This week, Obama was the guest on two episodes of Bush’s show Work in Progress, which Bush has apparently been hosting since 2019 with the mission of featuring “frank, funny, and oftentimes deeply personal conversations with people who inspire Sophia.” (OK!) Obama brought up her marriage in a discussion with Bush over what her schedule looks like these days, sharing that now that her husband is no longer president and her kids are grown up, she feels more empowered to spend her time how she wants to. She referred to one particular “real big example” this year of her looking at her calendar, and “without naming names,” choosing “to do what was best for me, not what I had to do.” In response, people “couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself, that they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing,” she went on. “This couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions for herself, right? But that is what society does to us.”

It’s pretty clear Obama was alluding to her absences at both Jimmy Carter’s funeral and President Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January, which, along with what I still maintain was a perfectly nice and normal Instagram post from her husband wishing her a happy birthday but that many people saw as otherwise, prompted weeks of whispering about the state of the Obamas’ marriage. And on the podcast, I couldn’t help but notice that Obama was the one to raise the topic of her marriage and invoke the rumors, not the other way around.

Incidentally, this appearance and exchange is a perfect illustration of one of the problems with celebrity-on-celebrity interviews. If a journalist were steering the conversation, they surely would have had some follow-up questions upon Obama’s mention of the D-word. Bush, though, offered the sympathetic response of someone who has also had the surely unpleasant experience of being the subject of tabloid intrigue—“Yeah, well, there’s always got to be drama if it doesn’t look like other people’s choices”—and chose to move on to kissing the former first lady’s butt about all the “amazing stories” she is telling in her new life as a content creator. But I’m sure Bush knows her audience better than I do and is right that they would rather hear her gush about The Later Daters, the Obamas’ Netflix reality show about senior citizens’ love lives, than hear her ask Obama any actual revealing questions. Besides, if Bush and other celebrities were known for their probing questions, they might find it trickier to book guests, and the whole celebrity podcast economy, of which Michelle Obama is now herself a part, might come crashing down.

As for why else Obama might have wound up talking to Sophia Bush of all people about this, it’s also worth noting that Bush is a longtime activist—she memorably tried to frame her 2022 wedding (to a guy she has since divorced) as a bold act of activism. In a bit of self-flattery, Bush referred to herself during her conversation with Obama as “a person who’s been honored to know you for a long time.” That Michelle: Always palling around with one Bush or another!

So is there any chance this interview actually quiets all the Obama divorce gossip? Though I’ve up to now considered it all pretty unfounded, and can see that the intention behind bringing it up was to point out how ridiculous and therefore untrue it is, I’ll say that the way Obama was talking about living her life for herself in parts of this interview definitely caught my attention. Here’s more of what she said: “I feel like it’s time for me to make some big-girl decisions about my life and to own it fully, right, because if not now, when? What am I waiting for? What am I going to spend the next 20 years, you know, because look, the, you know, the summers are … We’re in summer countdown at 61, right?” She added, “Now is the time for me to start asking myself these hard questions of who do I want? Who do I truly want to be every day?” If you ask me, these don’t sound like the questions a woman is asking herself when she’s deciding whether or not to attend presidential funerals and inaugurations. They sound much more existential. Sorry, they just do! I continue to hope the Obamas are happy, and to think of them breaking up, especially now, would be terribly sad. But I am slightly more open to the speculation now than I was previously. Another reason I hope it’s not true, though? I really don’t want to have to admit that Sophia Bush somehow got the scoop of the century

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