Barack Obama is not your emotional support president

[Celerity]

It’s strange that so many seem to want the ‘deporter in chief’ to speak out against Donald Trump’s immigration cruelty.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/16/barack-obama-donald-trump-protests-immigration/

https://archive.ph/eApZc



We have once again seen the force of the U.S. security apparatus turned on its own people in recent days. The actions of Los Angeles police officers and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been deeply disturbing. Rubber bullets fired at journalists. Crowds teargassed. A curfew imposed on America’s second-largest city — a city that, according to journalists and social media accounts, was nothing like the raging war zone that President Donald Trump and his acolytes made it out to be.

In times of chaos, I suppose, humans are hardwired to yearn for authority figures to tell them everything will be okay. And, for many, the emotional support figure par excellence will always be the 44th president of the United States. “Seems like today would be a good day for Barack Obama to give a fiery, inspirational speech. Or just say anything,” satirist Deven Green, a.k.a. Mrs. Betty Bowers, said on Bluesky. Others want Obama to stop playing basketball and hanging with celebrities and start helping.

“Obama’s detachment feels jarringly incongruous with the desperation of his longtime admirers — even more so given Trump’s assaults on what Obama achieved in office,” Mark Leibovich wrote in an Atlantic essay headlined “Where Is Barack Obama?” “It would be one thing if Obama had disappeared after leaving the White House, maybe taking up painting like George W. Bush. The problem is that Obama still very much has a public profile — one that screams comfort and nonchalance at a time when so many other Americans are terrified.”

So after a White majority elected Trump for the second time, it’s Barack Obama, the first Black president, who has an obligation to comfort the nation? But not George W. Bush and Bill Clinton? And, pray tell, just what sort of hopey-changey answer to our omni-crisis do people want to hear? As protests against ICE spread around the country, and Americans wake once again to the reality of our brutal deportation practices, people clearly long for Obama to be the permanent cheerleader-in-chief. Just one problem: Obama himself advanced the draconian systems his successor is now employing so gleefully. How does this make sense?

snip

[displacedvermoter]

1. He is still looking forward, and has no real desire to put himself in the bullseye

literally, or figuratively. Much wasted opportunity, both as President and subsequently as ex-President, sorry to say.