Trump’s New Conspiracy Theory: Obama Is Still President

Photo: Mark Makela/Getty Images

Donald Trump is a man who knows the value of playing the hits. Sometimes that means spinning “Y.M.C.A.” and other Village People songs during his DJ sets at Mar-a-Lago. Other times he shows his respect for the classics less literally, as when he uses the slogan “Make America Great Again, Again,” dresses like it’s still the ’80s, and keeps repeating the unhinged conspiracy theories that got him where he is today.

To Trump’s credit, he has recognized that questioning whether Barack Obama was really born in the United States won’t get the base going the way it did over a decade ago. Instead, he has found a fresher way to stoke MAGA voters’ Obama-related fears: claiming the two-term former president still actively controls the White House.

Trump has been alluding to this idea for weeks, but at a campaign event in New Hampshire on Monday, he explicitly endorsed it.

“You’ve been ripped off by everybody and betrayed by the corrupt globalists, Washington, Wall Street people. Those combinations of Washington, Wall Street, they’re the worst of all. And it’s never been worse than it is now under crooked Joe Biden, and, frankly, his boss, Barack Hussein Obama,” Trump said at the event. “I think it’s his boss.”

As with birtherism, Trump isn’t serving an original conspiracy theory; he’s adopting existing right-wing lunacy. Since Biden is a mainstream, generally inoffensive Democrat, Trump tried throughout the 2020 campaign to paint him as the puppet of more radical forces on the left. Trump regularly switched up the puppet master’s identity: At various points, it was Kamala Harris, “Bernie Sanders and AOC,” or “left-wing extremists” in general. But identifying the man behind the curtain as Barack Hussein (!!) Obama is new for Trump.

This bizarre idea has been gaining traction on the right in recent months. NBC News traces its surge in popularity to Ben Shapiro posting a meme of a 2020 Stephen Colbert interview in June. It showed Obama saying, “If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff and then I could sort of deliver the lines but somebody else was doing all the talking and ceremony, I’d be fine with that.” (At the 6:15 mark in the video below.)

It’s obvious Obama is joking, for several reasons: The Late Show With Stephen Colbert is a comedy program, Obama is laughing and smiling as he says this, and anyone who went through all the trouble of setting up a vast conspiracy so they could control their successor via hidden earpiece probably wouldn’t announce their plot on national TV.

Nevertheless, a number of right-wing personalities have recently suggested that Obama is actually still running the country, including Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, Representative Mike Kelly, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

Trump making unhinged allegations against Obama clearly works with this crowd, and it complements his general effort to paint Biden as too old and addled to run the country. But Trump may want to think twice before making this part of his stump speech. According to YouGov, Biden is the sixth-most-popular politician in the U.S. right now, and Obama is the first (Trump places 12th). If the 2024 election is framed as a showdown between Trump and Obama, our secret puppet-master president will probably win a fourth term.