With Michelle Obama busy recording her disastrous podcast with her brother, Barack Obama looks like a man without a purpose — drifting between mansions, jetting off on luxury trips with his wealthy friends, or cashing in on the speaking circuit. The glow of being the “first Black president” and the champion of “fundamental transformation” wore off years ago, especially after he hitched his wagon to Kamala Harris’s doomed presidential run.
Now, with Michelle’s own revelations — that she hated her time in the White House, that she doesn’t really enjoy her kids, and maybe doesn’t even like Barack — the shine isn’t just gone. What’s left looks more like decay beneath the surface.
Barack Obama still seems convinced that his words carry weight — but they don’t. The proof? Like so many politicians past their prime, he delivered another round of fact-free, inflammatory remarks overseas, this time in the United Kingdom. Funny how Obama and his allies prefer to criticize America on foreign soil, far from the voters they once claimed to represent.
On Wednesday, at his “An Evening with Barack Obama” event in London’s O2 Arena, the former president decided to pontificate on President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s autism initiative.
What followed was less eloquence than empty rhetoric — the latest reminder of how little relevance he actually has left:
We have the spectacle of my successor in the Oval Office, making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproved. And… the.. the degree to which… uh, that undermines public health. The degree to which that can do harm to women who are pregnant. The degree to which that creates anxiety for parents who do have children who are autistic.
Which, by the way, itself, is subject to a spectrum, and a lot of what is being trumpeted as these massive increases actually have to do with a broadening of the criteria across that spectrum so that people can get services and help. All of that is violence against the truth.
