This week brought another reminder that the political careers of President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama will forever be inextricably linked.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard put Obama squarely at the helm of a 2016 plot to discredit Trump before he took office, putting his successor in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s shadow. Trump, as is his wont, took it a step further.
“Based on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President Obama. He started it, and [Joe] Biden was there with him, and [James] Comey was there, and [James] Clapper. The whole group was there,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday.
“Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” Trump said. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined.”
Trump referenced a trove of declassified documents released by Gabbard’s team on July 18. The team concluded that the evidence that Russia wanted Trump elected president in 2016 was much weaker than advertised. Nevertheless, the narrative that Russia sought a Trump victory was the framing that the Obama administration chose in its initial intelligence assessment.
“There is irrefutable evidence that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false,” Gabbard said at a White House press briefing on Wednesday. “They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. It wasn’t.”
A spokesman for Obama denounced the “bizarre allegations” by Trump as “ridiculous” and “a weak attempt at distraction.”
The “distraction” presumably refers to the Jeffrey Epstein files. “The witch hunt that you should be talking about is they caught President Obama absolutely cold. … They tried to rig the election, and they got caught — and there should be very severe consequences for that,” Trump said in response to an Epstein-related question.
“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,” Obama’s spokesman continued. “These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”
The exchange highlighted a long-running feud between the two presidents. A famous real estate developer and reality TV star, Trump built his political brand through relentless attacks on Obama during the latter’s presidency. This included trafficking in conspiracy theories about Obama being constitutionally ineligible to serve as president because he was born in Kenya (all pertinent records show Obama was born in Hawaii).
Obama may have baited Trump into running for president with frequent snarky counterattacks, including an extended roast at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In October 2016, Obama participated in a Jimmy Kimmel Live segment in which he read “mean tweets” about himself. He included one from Trump, saying Obama “will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States!”
“Hey, @realDonaldTrump, at least I will go down as a president,” Obama shot back, triumphantly dropping his smartphone to laughter from the adoring studio audience.
Trump was elected president the following month.
The Obama coalition was eroded in 2016 and blown apart in 2024. While some of that had to do with neither Hillary Clinton nor Kamala Harris sharing Obama’s charisma and political talents — not to mention former President Joe Biden’s unpopular single term in office — the 44th president’s failings received much less attention.
This was partly due to the Democrats’ fixation on Russia allegedly swinging the 2016 presidential election to Trump, which eventually exceeded the party’s focus on Obama-Trump voters in the battleground states. Majorities of Democrats even told pollsters they believed Russia altered vote totals to elect Trump, though the intelligence community and mainstream Democratic elected officials never alleged this.
Obama’s effectiveness on the campaign trail on Harris’s behalf in 2024 has been regularly questioned. (He once seemingly accused young black men who were reluctant to vote for the Democratic ticket of sexism.) But while Obama privately criticized Biden, his vice president, for the reelection campaign he had been running before dropping out and entertained similar doubts about Harris before she took over, the drubbing down-ballot Democrats took during the eight years he was president was a big reason the party was stuck with those two as options.
Nonwhite voters have slowly started drifting away from the Democratic Party after Obama put up two phenomenal performances with these voting blocs in 2008 and 2012. What remains of Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” is college-educated white people, who weren’t quite enough for Harris last year.
Gabbard is a prime example of an Obama-era Democrat who has since defected to Trump’s GOP. She did not think Obama went far enough on foreign policy or civil liberties in office. She resigned from a Democratic National Committee leadership position because she supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and believed the DNC was biased against him in the 2016 Democratic primaries. Four years later, she launched a viral attack on Kamala Harris when she sought the nomination herself.
Now, Gabbard is leading the charge in an investigation of the Trump-Russia investigators.
Trump and Obama had seemingly buried the hatchet at former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral late last year, where the two were seen having a genial conversation. “I said, ‘Boy, they look like two people that like each other.’ And we probably do,” Trump said when asked about the viral video of their chat. “We have a little different philosophies, right? But we probably do. I don’t know. We just got along. But I got along with just about everybody.”
TRUMP AND RUSSIAGATE, RECONSIDERED
But each of them believes the other undermined their legitimacy as president — Trump with the Obama birtherism and its racial undertones, Obama with his role in promoting the Russiagate scandal that took up much of Trump’s first term. Trump’s second term got off to a noticeably better start without any similar controversy hanging over him, and Democratic elected officials generally accepted he won without an asterisk.
The release of Gabbard documents has ripped open these old wounds. Depending on what the Department of Justice does next following Gabbard’s criminal referrals, things could be about to get uglier than ever.