Trump’s Obama obsession has gone from bad to worse: He hates 'that his predecessor is wildly popular and he’s wildly unpopular’

Former President Barack Obama left the White House in January 2017, when Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States. Yet Trump continues to obsess over Obama’s presidency, and according to a report by CNN’s Daniel Dale, Trump’s obsession with Obama is becoming even worse.

Dale, in an article for CNN’s website, notes how often Trump has mentioned the former president in recent months, either verbally or in a tweet. According to Dale, Trump mentioned Obama 106 times in June, 68 times in July, 61 times in August, 51 times in September and 80 times in October.

“Over the five-month period,” Dale explains, “Trump mentioned Obama an average of 2.4 times per day. If you add in his 69 mentions of the ‘previous administration’ or ‘last administration,’ it was 2.8 times per day.”

CNN got its data from Bill Frischling of Factba.se, a site that tracks Trump’s statements.

“Through October,” Dale observes, “Trump had mentioned Obama by name 537 times during 2019 as a whole — an average of 1.8 times per day. That’s a 36% increase from the 395 mentions, 1.3 per day, Trump made of Obama in 2018 through October of that year and a 169% increase from the 200 mentions in 2017, 0.7 per day, through October of that year.”

Trump, as Dale points out, “has escalated his attacks on Obama even as Obama has stayed largely quiet about him.”

To be sure, Obama has generally kept a low profile since leaving the White House in January 2017. Obama increased his visibility during the 2018 midterms, speaking at rallies and campaigning for Democrats in key races. But overall, Trump has had a lot more to say about Obama than Obama has had to say about Trump.

Christina Reynolds, who served as director of media affairs in the Obama Administration and is now vice president of communications for Emily’s List, suspects that Trump might be mentioning Obama a lot in order to excite his base.

Reynolds told CNN, “Trump jump-started his political career by claiming then-President Obama was not an American. Beyond subscribing to that racist conspiracy theory, President Trump also knows that attacking Obama gins up his base and solidifies support for him by comparison. At a point when some Republicans are starting to openly question him, he seems to be going back to the old classics, so to speak.”

Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, who co-hosts the “Pod Save America” podcast, asserted that Trump probably resents Obama’s poll numbers. An August poll by Fox News, for example, found that 60% of registered voters had a favorable opinion of Obama, while only 41% had a favorable opinion of Trump.

Trump, Favreau told CNN, “always needs multiple enemies on the stump, and he must hate that his predecessor is wildly popular and he’s wildly unpopular.”