For those who are paying attention and care at all about human decency, the Trump administration’s political chaos and social instability is a challenge that’s making some well-meaning people say some strange things. One of the strangest can be attributed to Obama derangement syndrome.
O.D.S. sounds sensible enough.
Barack Obama was a popular president. His approval rating was a solid 59 percent when he left office. That was just a little off from his high of 69 percent in 2009. YouGov data from this year ranks him as the second-most-popular politician, after Jimmy Carter. More important than how much people still like Obama, is that a lot of people felt really good about themselves when he was president. Nostalgia is a heck of a drug.
Compared with Joe Biden and President Trump, Obama looks healthy. His speech at the Democratic National Convention last year showed that he still has the juice. And the moment feels important. Trump took the country into dangerous territory this week. He attempted to take control of the California National Guard and has deployed a Marine battalion to rein in protesting Angelenos.
Meanwhile, a line of tanks will soon fête the president in his Army birthday parade, a galling display of authoritarian theater.
This week the writer Mark Leibovich leveled up dinner party and social media murmurs about Obama’s whereabouts with an essay asking why the former president has been missing in action. The question speaks to an accepted truth: The Democratic Party lacks leadership. Senator Chris Murphy, Senator Cory Booker and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offer glimmers of a charismatic party head waiting in the wings. But Obama is the complete package with a track record.
That idea has enough common-sense appeal to feel right.
Unfortunately, it is absolute madness.
I don’t know which Obama some of my peers remember, but the ex-president was fairly consistent. He governed as a moderate who, at one time, would have been recognizable as a Reaganite. Only in the rightward drift of today’s Overton window does Obama’s presidency seem radically leftist. As the Democratic Party’s leader, he chastised those on the left, threw in the occasional respectability politics about young Black men and sagging pants and gave us an imperfect but critical stop on the road to universal health care. He was a decent president of historical import, but he was still very much a product of his times.
I get the sense that those with O.D.S. remember his speeches more than they remember how cautiously he governed. But I think what people are really remembering is a country where an Obama speech mattered.
What they must accept — if we are to do the hard work before us — is that we no longer have that country.
Put aside the futility of a politician of no elected office, an organizer with no base and a celebrity with no new product to market convening a nation. The media environments of 2025 and 2009 are so different that they should barely be considered of the same species.
Over 50 million people watched Obama’s first joint address to Congress in 2009. Yes, he was a historic president and a gifted speech maker. But he was also speechifying in a media environment that could easily deliver 50 million viewers for political theater. In 2009 if you had the iPhone 3G, you were on the cutting edge of mobile technology. If you were a newshound, you probably followed a dozen or so blogs. Maybe you aggregated them using a free web tool like Google Reader. Facebook was still the online public square, but Twitter was making inroads for real-time web-based discourse. Maybe you were among the millions of Americans losing faith in the news media. But you probably still learned about breaking news at the same time as most others; swine flu and Michael Jackson’s death were big 2009 water cooler topics.
All of this is to say that a president benefited a lot from a media world in which we shared the same reality.
By 2012, the economic model of the web had shifted markedly. The freewheeling web was transforming into Big Tech’s algorithms, apps and monopolies. The outrage era had begun.
And by 2025? Forget about it. Anyone who has talked to a stranger about the news knows how our shared reality has deteriorated. It’s not just the uninformed. It’s the ill informed who believe A.I.-generated videos, share political memes about stolen elections and engage in the most unhinged political infotainment imaginable.
That’s the bell that those with O.D.S. imagine Obama can unring. But demanding that he reconstitute objective truth is like me wearing lowrider jeans to coax my abs back into existence. The desire is understandable; it’s the expectation that is deranged.
It is also symptomatic of a deeper problem among both the political center and the political left: They don’t want the discipline of a political faith, but they still clamor for a charismatic preacher.
That’s what’s behind the silly calls for a Joe Rogan of the left. Rogan is not a skilled communicator. Have you listened to his show? I have. He is entertaining, on some level, but he isn’t good. That is, he doesn’t clarify. He doesn’t educate. You don’t feel anything but mildly invested in his hourslong shtick. The show is popular because Rogan is as fine a way to distract yourself for a couple of hours as a white noise machine.
It is easy to look at a reality TV aficionado like Trump and think, “Yeah, we need more of that. We need a politician with an entertainer’s instincts to sell our political message.”
But Trump’s prodigious instincts are a symptom of the information environment. Those political instincts are only as good as the audience’s power to amplify him. If we assume that the left is a coherent ideology with committed adherents — and I would argue that is debatable — it does not need a Rogan. It needs a Spotify. That platform has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in “The Joe Rogan Experience,” amplifying his existing audience and affording him legitimacy. Spotify took a lashing in public and absorbs the occasional dust-up for platforming a controversial character because his audience is worth it to the company.
I know his popularity feels powerful. Anyone who has struggled to find a couple hundred fans of a book, a blog or a podcast looks at Rogan’s millions of streams as if it were the Rock of Gibraltar. But the influencer economy is set up to produce popularity, a pretty empty signifier. A dog can get millions of social media followers, just like Rogan. The real power is the platform that can amplify that popularity and insulate it from detractors.
Elon Musk understood that. While liberals mocked his purchase of Twitter for being a bad financial deal, the platform had acted as a sort of public editor for media elites who had long been protected from the consequences of their ideological priors. With his purchase, Musk brazenly broke the most powerful discourse maker in the short history of social media. And influencing politics and business is priceless.
No fire and brimstone speech can turn back the clock on what digital media has done to how we talk to one another, how we consume news and how much outrage now shapes a million versions of personalized reality.
O.D.S. asks too much and understands too little. Yes, some of the hubris of wanting Obama to save us is about asking the Black man to don his cape. And our splintered realities are, in part, a product of the way his race — and the racial coalition that elected him — was a fundamental threat to the conservative agenda. That created the white reclamation movement that elected Trump twice; that certainly feels sucky. But you cannot relive the moment that it all seemed to go haywire by asking the original actors to change the scene.
Begging Obama to save us is undignified. It reeks of weakness, and it begets more weakness. The answer will not come from above. Congressional Democrats are not effectively reflecting voters’ anger and despondency. Their “we are the minority party” defense is already wearing thin. But the real vacuum is not in Congress or in the White House. It is in the streets.
We must start asking how we can save ourselves. We are seeing the start of that in places like Los Angeles, San Antonio and Raleigh, N.C. Only direct, sustained protest will protect us. Everyday people standing between authoritarianism and our freedom scare the administration. They reveal the greatest informal mechanism for democratic enforcement: not kings, not former presidents, but the power of the people.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. @tressiemcphd
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