Trump mocks Obama’s presidential center. Why the barking?

A deep dive into the racist history of a failed man who cheated his way to the top

BY SOUMANOU SALIFOU

Weeks before the lavish dedication ceremony of President Obama’s presidential center which was attended by all former U.S. presidents and scored of foreign dignitaries, Trump—who was not invited—could not control his racist ticks and indulged (again) in his usual insane attacks on the first Black president in the nation’s history—the very man he used over a decade ago to start his political career.

President Barack Obama dedicated his presidential center last Thursday, then opened it to the public the next day. The majestic 19.3-acre campus is in Chicago’s historic Jackson Park, the very spot through which the president said he entered Chicago 40 years ago. The sprawling multi-building complex, which is anchored by a 225-foot (70-meter) museum tower and includes numerous facilities, green spaces, and recreational areas, is the most expensive presidential library in history, having cost about $850 million to build.

In addition to the vitriol he’s known for, calling the breathtaking piece of architecture a “disaster,” a “woke” construction, and vowing it will never be completed. Trump posted on his social media account an AI-generated image depicting the center as a giant trash can.

There were no major reactions to that new racist slur by Trump, exactly because it was nothing new. But it calls for a deep dive into his obsession about the first Black president in U.S. history.

Trump’s obsession with Obama dates back a long time.

On February 5, 16 minutes before midnight—around the time Donald Trump usually posts crazy things—a video clip filled with falsehood about the 2020 presidential election that Mr. Trump lost surfaced on his Truth Social account. The clip briefly showed the faces of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama superimposed onto the bodies of apes, dancing along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a song long associated with stereotypical depictions of Africa. No cruelty or insanity is beneath Donald Trump, but the video drew outrage from across the political spectrum, forcing Trump to order it taken down—arguably reluctantly so, after making some ridiculous excuses.

Flashback to when it started

The second trending item on Yahoo! for a good part of the day on October 24, 2012—that is 12 days before the November 6, 2012 U.S. presidential election in which President Obama was seeking a second term—was the much-anticipated announcement by then-New York real estate entrepreneur Donald Trump that he would give five million dollars to any charity of President Obama’s choice “If Barack Obama opens up and gives his college records and applications and if he gives his passport applications and records.” The remarks were in the context of the so-called birther movement initiated by a group of Americans who doubted Obama was born in the United States.

When it became clear that Obama was born in the United States, Trump said in a video shot in his office and uploaded to YouTube: “Barack Obama is the least transparent president in the history of this country; I’m very honored to have gotten him to release his long-form birth certificate or whatever it may be.”

Trump had been known long before 2012 as a narcissist who would blow his own trumpet any way he could to be in the news, but not quite yet in those years as the sickening bigot who would do anything, including using the racism entrenched in him, to exploit the insecurity of the segments of the U.S. population who fear becoming the minority group within a couple of decades.

Thanks to his leadership in the birth movement, Trump brought out in the open a wave of anti-Black racism that few people thought still existed.

Remarkably, the unprecedented acrimony and blatant disrespect for the president of the United States championed by the buffoon that was Trump were also fired at President Obama by public figures who seemed qualified to be called “serious.”

During an appearance on Fox News on October 4, 2012, John H. Sununu, former Governor of New Hampshire and White House Chief of Staff under President George H. W. Bush, delighted in describing Obama’s lackluster performance during the October 3, 2012 presidential debate as “babbling,” and did not hesitate to call the president “lazy.” Did Sununu rub it in! “When you’re not that bright you can’t get better prepared,” the former White House aide also said about Obama, who graduated from Harvard Law with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude, having served as the first African American editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

Interestingly, 2012 was the year when Mark Meadows, then a Republican candidate for North Carolina’s 11th congressional district, asked that President Obama be sent “back home to Kenya or wherever.” Meadows, who won the congressional seat, later served as Trump’s chief of staff from 2020 to 2021. Similarly, in 2013, Rafael Cruz, father of Senator Ted Cruz, also urged a crowd to send President Obama “back to Kenya,” describing the president as an “outright Marxist.”

Like a brush fire fed by strong winds and ultra-dry leaves during the Harmattan season in West Africa, the anti-Obama wave set in motion by Donald Trump saw its manifestation in the society-wide hike in anti-Black racism, ironically in the aftermath of the election of the first Black president of the United States.

It’s easy, therefore, to connect the dots between increased anti-Black sentiments and Trump finally coming out of the closet in 2012 to champion the so-called birther movement. It was a downpayment that proved beneficial to a failed businessman that nobody, including himself, dreamed could ever become president of this great nation.

As if acting in accordance with the African proverb that says, “if you run after a mad man who hits you and runs away, you would be viewed as a mad man yourself,” Obama chose not to respond to Trump’s provocations. That was until October 24, 2012, one year after releasing his birth certificate, when he appeared on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” The feud, Obama said, “all dates back to when we were growing up together in Kenya. We had constant run-ins on the soccer field. He wasn’t very good and resented it. When we finally moved to America, I thought it would be over.”

The key word is “resented,” though not about soccer. If you have seen Trump play golf—apparently the only sport he plays—you know he is not good at any sport.

Trump, who reportedly inherited from his father $200 million that he mishandled and had to cheat his way to the top, has been jealous for two decades of Obama, a younger, brilliant Black man who rose from humble beginnings to become president and who has played fair and square his entire life.

Trump’s life history is replete with humiliations and business scandals of epic proportion widely exposed by the media, including in a CNN documentary hosted by one of the channel’s anchors, Erin Burnett, a few years ago. Among the most notorious ones, the Donald J. Trump Foundation established in 1988 was dissolved in 2018 after the New York Attorney General’s office found out that it was actually used for Trump’s personal and political gains. In 1995, Trump defaulted on over $3 billion of bank loans, and the lenders seized the Plaza Hotel along with most of his other properties in a “vast and humiliating restructuring” that allowed him to avoid personal bankruptcy.

In 2018, the New York Attorney General’s office hit The Trump University, a company Trump created in 2004 to sell real estate seminars for up to $35,000, with a $40-million civil suit alleging that the company—which the office said didn’t qualify as a university—made false statements and defrauded consumers. The bogus university stopped operations in 2010. Two class actions were filed in federal court against Trump and his companies. Shortly after winning the 2016 presidential election, Trump agreed to pay a total of $25 million to settle the three cases.

Lastly so far, in February 2024, Trump was ordered by the New York Supreme Court to pay more than $450 million for engaging in “massive fraud to falsely inflate his net worth and unjustly enrich himself, his family, and his organization.” Trump was banned from doing business in New York for three years.

Obama’s life history has no chaotic turns.

Elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, Obama won reelection in 1998 and was re-elected again in 2002. With only one trial, he won a U.S. senate seat in November 2004 with 70 percent of the vote, the largest margin of victory for a senate candidate in Illinois history, taking 92 of the state’s 102 counties, including several where Democrats traditionally do not perform well. When he was sworn in on January 3, 2005, he became the only senate member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Credited with several legislative achievements, Obama soon had his eyes on the biggest prize in politics: The presidency. He ran against a formidable candidate, a decorated war veteran and influential senator, John McCain. Obama won in a landslide, with 365 electoral votes to 173 received by McCain. Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote to McCain’s 45.7. Obama completed two terms with huge accomplishments and zero scandal. Not the case with Donald Trump who, after winning the 2016 presidential election to everyone’s surprise and his own, became the only president in U.S. history to be impeached twice, and later the only felon to serve as president.

While there is no publicly verified information regarding Obama’s SAT scores, PrepScholar, a reputable online test preparation platform founded by Harvard graduates that offers customized, algorithm-driven study programs for several exams, has estimated his score at 1340 out of 1600. Magoosh, another test preparation platform, mentions a potential score of 1410. Both very high scores put Obama among the public figures who have scored the highest on SAT. For sure, Obama’s SAT score has never been taboo.

It’s a different when it comes to Trump. Despite his claims about being a top student, Trump reportedly instructed his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to threaten high schools, colleges, and the College Board with legal action to prevent the release of his SAT scores and academic grades. Cohen made the claims when he testified in Congress in February 2019, adding that he sent letters to several institutions. The action is confirmed by a letter to Fordham University dating to 2015.

The Trump’s midnight video of February 6, 2026 and his attack on the Obama presidential center were not just the hallucination of the whacky, failed man the public has known for decades. The hardcore racist in him proved, once again, his inability to get over the fact that he is no match to a brilliant Black man whose superior intellectual ability and political prowess make him insanely jealous.

The post Trump mocks Obama’s presidential center. Why the barking? first appeared on The African Magazine.