CNN
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President Donald Trump and his predecessor Barack Obama have met for a substantive conversation exactly once: November 10, 2016, two days after Trump won his first election. It was Trump’s first time in the Oval Office. By most accounts, it was a little awkward.
Eight years and eight months later, the meeting cropped up again this week in a very different context. On Sunday, Trump posted an AI-generated video using footage from the session to depict FBI agents bursting into the office, pulling Obama from his chair and handcuffing him as he falls to his knees.
In the video, Trump watches on with a grin. His campaign anthem “Y.M.C.A.” blares in the background.
For years — since well before he launched a bid to become president himself — Trump has marinated in a singular fixation on the 44th president, whom he almost always refers to as “Barack Hussein Obama.”
This week, Trump’s preoccupation with Obama — and specifically his role in probing Russia’s role in the 2016 election — reemerged in dramatic fashion, drawing a rare rebuke from Obama’s office and reigniting the bitterest feud inside the rarified club of presidents.
Trump revived his old — but never forgotten — grievance as questions swirl about his own handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, pivoting quickly from a reporter’s question Tuesday about an Epstein associate to a lengthy diatribe in which accused his predecessor of treason.
Critics saw in Trump’s response a clear attempt to divert attention from a controversy that has put him at odds with influential members of his own base. Yet his resentments toward Obama predate any one effort at deflection, and aides say Trump has been as animated about his new accusations in private as he’s been this week in front of cameras.
His enmity has alternated between strategic attempts to erode Obama’s legacy and what advisers have described as more visceral disdain for someone Trump views as both unwarrantedly popular and the root of many of his troubles since entering politics a decade ago.
“Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Tuesday. “Obama’s been caught directly.”
During his first term, Trump’s gripes ran the gamut, from complaints about Obama’s handling of foreign policy to outlandish accusations he spied on Trump Tower.
Since retaking office in January, however, Trump had mostly been directing his ire toward his more immediate predecessor, Joe Biden, whom he portrays as a largely comatose bystander to his Democratic advisers’ radical agenda.
Obama and Trump even appeared to have a friendly conversation in the pews at Washington National Cathedral in January when they both attended the late President Jimmy Carter’s funeral. Trump invited Obama for a round of golf at one of his clubs, a person familiar with the conversation said.
“Boy, they look like two people [who] like each other,” Trump said a few days later when asked about the footage. “And we probably do.”
Now, probably not.
“He’s guilty,” Trump said Tuesday of Obama, sitting alongside the Philippine president. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of.”
The basis for Trump’s claims came via a report, issued last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, that sought to undermine an assessment made in 2017 that Russia sought to influence the election the year earlier in favor of Trump.
That assessment was later backed up by a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report that was endorsed by every Republican on the panel, including then-Sen. Marco Rubio, who is now Trump’s Secretary of State and acting national security adviser.
But Gabbard and Trump came to a different conclusion, and have accused Obama and top officials in his administration of manipulating intelligence to support a theory that Russia swung the results of the election.
Their findings appear to conflate Russia’s attempts to sow dissent through leaks and social media campaigns with efforts to hack election infrastructure and change vote totals, which intelligence officials have said did not happen in the 2016 contest.
Nonetheless, Trump framed the new report Tuesday as the “biggest scandal in the history of our country.”
“Obama was trying to lead a coup,” Trump said. “And it was with Hillary Clinton.”
A few hours later, a spokesman for Obama dismissed the accusations, making sure to note that ordinarily the former president ignores Trump’s “constant nonsense and misinformation” but could not, in this case, remain silent.
“These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction,” said the spokesman, Patrick Rodenbush.
Trump has long viewed the Russia investigation as a cloud over his first presidency, one cooked up by his political rivals to subvert his legitimacy and undermine his ability to win an election.
In his second term, Trump has prioritized retribution against those who led investigations into him — and, in his mind, made his first term miserable.
Even though Obama was out of power by the time a special counsel was appointed and Congress began probing, Trump has singled out the former president as the “ringleader” of the effort.
“This is, like, proof — irrefutable proof — that Obama was seditious,” Trump said, adding a few seconds later that assigning blame on lower-level officials was a mistake: “I get a kick when I hear everyone talks about people I never even heard of,” he said. “No, no, it was Obama. He headed it up. And it says so right in the papers.”
Trump initially launched into the lengthy screed when asked a question about the Justice Department’s plans to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, the Epstein associate who is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison for conspiring with the late sex offender to sexually abuse minors.
That Trump pivoted almost immediately — and without a great deal of explanation — from answering the Epstein question to his diatribe on Obama did little to dispel the impression he was using the issue to deflect from a scandal now entering its third week. Trump has been explicit that he believes the Epstein case is getting too much attention.
“We had the Greatest Six Months of any President in the History of our Country, and all the Fake News wants to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax!” he wrote on social media Tuesday.
But his anger toward Obama, voiced repeatedly over the course of his meeting, spoke to something deeper than a diversion tactic. It was a glimpse into a lingering grudge that appears unlikely to ever entirely disappear.
The resentments stretch back more than a decade, to the “birther” conspiracy Trump fueled years before vying for the presidency himself. His indignation appeared to deepen when Obama made fun of him during a 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech and television cameras found Trump scowling in the audience.
By the time Obama was handing off power to Trump, the seeds of suspicion had been planted, even if the two men put on a show of comity in the Oval Office.
Trump’s aides now look back on that period as a moment of deception.
“I watched a clip of (Obama) this weekend saying, you know, I’m going to do everything I can to help Donald Trump come in. That’s how our country will be successful. He said that to President Trump’s face in the Oval Office during that transition period,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week on the “Ruthless Podcast.”
“Meanwhile, he was holding secret meetings in the White House with top law enforcement and intelligence officials to put out this fake intelligence and mislead the American public,” she went on.
It’s all a distant cry from the mostly cordial — at least in public — relations between presidents that had been the norm for decades. That standard mostly died during Trump’s first term.
Since their single meeting in 2016, Trump and Obama have barely spoken, except for pleasantries at state occasions.
Former first lady Michelle Obama has taken to skipping any event where Trump might also appear.
