Barack Obama planned to keep his distance from politics after leaving office—until Democrats’ failure to hit Trump forced him off the sidelines.
“I actually found myself drawn back into day-to-day politics or commentary more than I had wanted to be,” Obama told Marc Maron on the final episode of Maron’s WTF podcast Monday, describing the “weird situation” that compelled him to speak out against Trump. “I leave office and there’s no obvious person who’s now the shadow prime minister, the leader of the party for the Democrats.”
“There were a lot of terrific people who were doing good work, but, you know, we have this weird situation where you don’t have a designated person who’s speaking on behalf of the whole party.”
“I thought I was gonna be able to remove myself more from being out there in public and was going to be able to concentrate on what I really wanted to do, which was coach the next generation of leadership,” he explained, but “I kept on being asked to comment on news of the day.”
Obama, 64, has only rarely called out the current president since Trump took office in 2017.
While Obama was quieter during Trump’s first term, critiquing Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, the ex-president’s pushback has become more pointed in Trump’s second term, where he’s slammed the 45th president’s “creeping authoritarian tendencies.”
On Monday, he called out firms for bending the knee to Trump in the White House’s battles with American universities and the media.
Obama and wife Michelle have taken on other public-facing projects since leaving the White House, like with their Netflix partnership and the former first lady’s IMO podcast. The former president also said he used his initial time as a civilian to to mend a “big deficit” in the couple’s marriage, telling Maron they “went on a lot of trips and hung out and just had nice dinners and, and slept in.” Though he’d like to focus on his projects, he echoed others who’ve said that the Democratic Party has too few emerging leaders who can take on MAGA.
It’s “flattering” that people believe he has the “moral persuasion” and “credibility” to call attention to Trump, Obama said Monday, but there are significant drawbacks. “I tried to be a little bit disciplined about recognizing that I’d moved on to a new phase where I did not have formal power…and so more than anything for the long term, what I could do that would be most helpful would be to start promoting up, lifting up, shining a spotlight on, you know, that next generation of, of leadership and talent, new voices.”
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