Trump wants to run against Barack Obama. It's a shame that he can't.
He needs a foil. Going after Clinton is tired and he doesn't know who he'll face yet in November. Besides, Obama tickles the lizard brain of the racist members of his base like nothing else. In fact, it tickles his own lizard brain in more ways than one.
Today he pretty much said that any lives lost due to Iran's terrorism is due to Obama's foreign policy -- in fact, Obama has blood on his hands. Of course, the opposite is true. Trump's unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal and his "maximum pressure" is what has caused the recent bloodshed. That deal was the greatest hope to bring Iran into compliance with international law and norms. It was a start, anyway.
Now all bets are off.
But it isn't just the Iran situation that Trump blames on Obama:
In Trump's view, the economy needed to be fixed, because of Obama. The country was overrun with illegal immigrants, because of Obama. China was eating our lunch, because of Obama. America had become a joke to the rest of the world, in large part because of Obama.
In response, Trump has withdrawn from two major international agreements -- the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords -- brokered by Obama. He has pursued bilateral trade deals in explicit opposition to the Obama-supported Trans-Pacific Partnership. And he has attempted to negotiate with North Korea, in direct opposition to Obama's policy of "strategic patience." Trump has even threatened allies once embraced by Obama, most notably blasting Western European countries for not paying "their fair share" in funding the NATO alliance, which he has threatened to leave on several occasions.
"His general approach is to do exactly the opposite of what Obama did," said Jen Psaki, the former White House communications director under Obama and a CNN contributor. "Even the way they describe their strategy is in opposition to the previous president." A November analysis from CNN's Daniel Dale shows Trump has mentioned Obama and the Obama administration by name more frequently in the past 18 months than he had in the first 18 months of his presidency.
By the way, Trump might want to rethink running against the ghost of Obama. He would lose:
Obama's 63% retrospective approval rating is slightly higher than the 59% he received in Gallup's final measurement of him as president in January 2017.
Americans' retrospective approval rating of Obama is essentially the same as those for George H.W. Bush (64%) and Bill Clinton (62%). Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter have ratings in the mid- to upper 50s, but fewer Americans have opinions of those presidents, who served from 1974-1977 and 1977-1981, respectively -- accounting for some of the differences between them and more recent presidents.
A slim majority of Americans, 53%, approve of the job George W. Bush did as president, higher than only Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.
Trump has never been able to lift his support beyond his loyal cult at around 42%. In a normal democracy that would not be enough to even think about winning re-election but in our screwy system it is.
And the fact is that he's not going to be running against Obama. He'll be up against one of the Democrats currently running and none of them have the hold on the party that Obama has. When he turns his attention to whoever wins, the dynamic will inevitably change.
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