Why Trump Is Obsessed With Barack Obama

There is a question that has been sitting in the middle of American politics for twenty years and nobody has answered it honestly.Why can’t Trump stop talking about Barack Obama.Not occasionally. Not when it is politically relevant. Constantly. At rallies that have nothing to do with Obama. In interviews where Obama’s name has no reason to come up. In executive orders written specifically to erase policies that were working. In a years long campaign to convince the world that Obama was not born in America that continued long after a birth certificate was produced and every court that reviewed the claim rejected it.This is not strategy. A strategist would have moved on. This is not politics. A politician would have found a more useful enemy by now. This is not ideology. Ideology does not explain why a sitting president spends rally time relitigating the accomplishments of a man who left office years ago.This is psychology. And once you understand the specific mechanisms driving it you will never be able to watch Trump mention Obama’s name again without knowing exactly what you are seeing.The MirrorStart with the most uncomfortable truth in the script.Trump does not hate Barack Obama.He wants to be him.Heinz Kohut at the University of Chicago spent his career studying what happens when a person who has built their entire identity around a false sense of superiority encounters someone who is genuinely superior. Not performatively. Not through inheritance or accident or bluster. Actually, measurably, undeniably superior in the qualities that produce real respect.Kohut found that for people with fragile constructed self-images, that encounter does not produce admiration or motivation. It produces a specific and devastating kind of pain that he called narcissistic injury.Narcissistic injury is the psychological wound a person experiences when confronted with someone who has the qualities, achievements, and admiration they believe should belong to them. It is not envy in the ordinary sense. It is something more destabilizing. It is the collision between the false self a person has constructed and the living proof that the construction is false.Obama is self-made. Trump inherited everything and then spent decades performing the role of a self-made man.Obama is respected across party lines, across cultures, across countries by people who have nothing to gain from respecting him. Trump is defended only by people who need something from him or fear what happens if they stop.Obama is calm, contained, and at peace with himself in a way that no amount of money, power, or media coverage can manufacture. Trump has had all three in abundance and has never for a single public moment appeared calm, contained, or at peace.Every time Trump sees Obama he sees the proof of everything he is not. That is not a political grievance. That is a mirror. And the mirror shows the truth. And the truth is the wound that drives everything else.The EnvyThe wound produces something specific.Roy Baumeister at Florida State University spent decades studying what happens when people with inflated but fragile self-images encounter someone who possesses what they believe they deserve. His findings overturned the assumption that aggression comes from low self-esteem. What he found was that the most dangerous and persistent aggression comes from people who think very highly of themselves but whose self-image has no stable foundation.When that self-image is confronted with someone who genuinely has what the narcissist only performs having, the response is not reflection. It is not motivation to improve. It is rage.Baumeister called this threatened egotism. The fragile self-image does not absorb the challenge. It treats it as a survival threat and responds accordingly.Trump wanted the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama won one.Trump wanted to be regarded as intelligent. Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, wrote two books that were regarded as works of genuine literary merit, and spoke in public with a precision and nuance that Trump has never approached.Trump wanted the kind of public love that does not require a rally or a media apparatus or a carefully managed information environment to sustain. Obama had it without trying. He still has it. It follows him into private life and it has not diminished.Trump has spent his entire public life chasing a version of respect that Obama carries effortlessly. And the chasing makes it worse. Because you cannot chase your way into being someone you are not. You cannot buy the qualities that produce genuine admiration. You cannot take them by executive order. And somewhere underneath all the noise and the performance and the relentless self-promotion, Trump knows it.That knowing is the wound that never closes.The RivalryWhen a narcissist cannot become the person they envy they move to the only strategy left.They try to destroy what they cannot have.Not because destroying it gives them what they want. The destruction never produces relief. It never closes the wound. It never makes Trump more respected or more admired or more at peace. He knows this because he has been trying for twenty years and none of it has worked.He does it because he cannot stand that it exists outside of his control.In 2013 psychologist Mitja Back at the University of Munster published research on how grandiose narcissists respond when their primary strategy of admiration seeking fails. He found that they shift to a second strategy. Not competition. Not self-improvement. Destruction.Back called this narcissistic rivalry. It is the antagonistic self-protective response where a narcissist attempts to devalue, attack, and eliminate the source of the status threat rather than compete with it on merit.The birther conspiracy is the clearest example in American political history.Trump spent years telling anyone who would listen that Obama was not born in America. A birth certificate was produced. Investigators were sent to Hawaii. Every court that reviewed the claim rejected it. The claim had no evidence behind it from the beginning and produced no evidence across years of being advanced.Trump kept going anyway.Not because he believed it. Because he needed it to be true. Because if Obama was illegitimate then everything Obama achieved was fraudulent. And if everything Obama achieved was fraudulent then Trump did not have to sit with the fact that Obama achieved it and Trump did not. Could not. Will never be able to.Obama cannot be bought. Cannot be intimidated. Cannot be flattered into compliance or threatened into silence. Cannot be controlled.That specific quality, the inability to be controlled, is the thing Trump cannot survive in another person. It is the thing that makes the rivalry permanent and the obsession inescapable.He is not trying to build something better than Obama built.He is trying to make sure Obama’s name disappears.That is not politics.That is the rivalry of a man who lost the competition before it started.The TrapHere is the cruelest part of the psychology.Every attempt Trump makes to erase Obama makes the wound worse.Dan Kahan at Yale University published research on what happens when a threat to a person’s core identity cannot be neutralized through normal means. He found that the brain does not accept defeat. It does not recalibrate or adjust or find a new approach. It escalates. It constructs increasingly extreme responses in an attempt to eliminate the threat. And each escalation, when it fails, produces a stronger response than the one before.Kahan called this identity protective cognition.Obama’s birth certificate was released. Trump kept going for years.Obama’s policies were reversed one by one. Obama’s approval ratings stayed higher than Trump’s throughout both of Trump’s presidencies.Obama’s name was scrubbed from government websites and official records. Obama published a memoir that sold millions of copies, won awards, and was read by people in countries around the world.Obama gave a speech and the entire world paid attention.Every erasure attempt fails because the thing Trump is trying to erase is not a policy or a record or a name on a website. It is the living proof that genuine dignity, genuine intelligence, and genuine respect cannot be faked, bought, manufactured, or taken by executive order.Obama exists.And as long as Obama exists Trump cannot escape what Obama’s existence proves about him.The trap has no exit. The brain escalates because it cannot accept defeat. The escalation fails because the threat cannot be eliminated. The failure activates the wound. The wound demands another attempt. The attempt fails. The cycle restarts.That is why he cannot stop.That is why he will never stop.The ScapegoatThere is one more mechanism that has been running alongside all of the others for twenty years.The economy is struggling. Obama’s fault.Crime is up. Obama’s fault.Foreign policy is in shambles. Obama’s fault.A trade war that Trump started is damaging American businesses and raising prices for American consumers. Obama’s fault.Things that happened years after Obama left office. Things Obama had no involvement in. Things that are the direct result of Trump’s own decisions.Obama’s fault.In 1954 psychologist Gordon Allport at Harvard University published The Nature of Prejudice. In it he documented what happens when a person cannot tolerate their own failures and inadequacies. He found that the brain looks for a target. Someone onto whom every failure can be displaced. Someone who absorbs the blame so the person doing the blaming never has to face their own responsibility.Allport called this scapegoating.Scapegoating is when a person displaces their own failures, inadequacies, and frustrations onto a target who becomes the symbolic cause of everything wrong, protecting the person from having to confront what they themselves caused.Trump did not choose Obama as his scapegoat randomly. He chose the person whose existence already wounds him the most. Because the choice serves two psychological needs simultaneously.It protects Trump from having to admit his own failures. And it diminishes the man Trump can never be. One move. Two needs met.This is why the scapegoating has never stopped and has never evolved. It has been the same target for twenty years because the target is not chosen for political utility. It is chosen for psychological necessity. Obama is the explanation for everything Trump cannot fix, achieve, or become.And that will never change. Because Trump will never fix, achieve, or become those things. And Obama will never stop existing as the proof of it.What This MeansTrump does not hate Barack Obama.He wants to be Barack Obama.He wants the natural dignity. The earned respect. The genuine love of people who do not need anything from him. The calm authority of a man who is completely at peace with who he is. The intelligence that does not have to be performed because it is simply present. The legacy that does not have to be defended because it speaks for itself.And he knows he will never have it.Not with all the money. Not with all the power. Not with the presidency. Not with the executive orders or the rallies or the media apparatus or the years of trying to make Obama’s name disappear from the public record.Because those things cannot be bought or faked or stolen.And the man who has spent his entire life buying, faking, and stealing knows that better than anyone.For Trump supporters who wonder why he keeps bringing up Obama at rallies that have nothing to do with him: it is not strategy. It is not political calculation. It is a man who cannot escape the shadow of someone who is everything he pretends to be.For the rest of us: the obsession explains everything. Every irrational reversal. Every unprovoked attack. Every rally where a name comes up that has no reason to be there.This is not governance.This is one fragile man watching someone else be everything he will never be.And being completely powerless to stop it.Watch on YouTubeSourcesKohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. International Universities Press.Kohut, H. (1977). The Restoration of the Self. International Universities Press.Baumeister, R. F., Smart, L., and Boden, J. M. (1996). Relation of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. Psychological Review, 103(1), 5-33.Back, M. D., Kuefner, A. C. P., Dufner, M., Gerlach, T. M., Rauthmann, J. F., and Denissen, J. J. A. (2013). Narcissistic admiration and rivalry: Disentangling the bright and dark sides of narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(6), 1013-1037.Kahan, D. M. (2017). Misconceptions, misinformation, and the logic of identity-protective cognition. Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper Series No. 164. Yale Law School.Allport, G. W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe