The Rise and Fall of Barack Obama

Official portrait of Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley

I know quite a few proud members of Team MAGA who voted for Barack Obama, the first time. I did.

Taken by the candidate’s eloquence, my brother-in-law — a lifelong, staunch conservative — traveled three hours to hear Obama speak during the 2008 campaign,

On election night that year I was so thrilled by this epic moment in history that I took the Metro to the White House, and stood outside with other Americans, black and white, smiling through tears. We had overcome the sin of slavery, I thought. True, it was a sin invented by the Africans, fueled by the Europeans, but it was in America that the reckoning came full circle. A black man had been elected president, by white voters, on lofty campaign rhetoric about hope and change. We had honored the deaths of 620,000 killed in the Civil War, and more, healed the wounds of our founding.

Now, President Trump has removed Obama’s portrait from it place of prominence in the White House, and that is a fitting elegy for a man who turned out to be the chief architect of the greatest, most vicious coup in the entire arc of American political life.

Intel records — bravely declassified by DNI Tulsi Gabbard — show that in his last days in the White House in January 2017 Obama launched a false psy-op against incoming President Donald Trump, ordering a falsification of Intel documents to make it look like Russians had stolen the election in collusion with Trump. New docs released this week show that then DNI James Clapper told National Security Adviser Mike Rogers, who was not convinced the intel was accurate, to “get on board,” in the “highest tradition of that’s OUR story and we’re sticking to it.”

Hillary Clinton’s had paid for a defamatory Steele dossier that was then used by Obama’s dirty political, intel & media operatives to bring down Trump’s first presidency. The Russia hoax, the impeachments, the lawfare — all of it was designed to keep Trump from carrying out his policy initiatives. As Peter Strzok famously said in a text to his lover at the Justice Department, the Russia investigation was an "insurance policy" against a Trump presidency. As he reassured Lisa Page, “We'll stop it." Suing the DOJ, claiming the agency had violated his right to privacy when it revealed the lovers’ texts, he won a $2 million settlement. Of our taxpayer money.

Amid this conspiracy of evil, the fact that Trump succeeded at all in his first term — improving the economy, slowing immigration, making peace in the Mideast with the Abraham Accords — is a great tribute to his remarkable resilience against the odds. After what Mollie Hemingway called “a rigged election” in 2020, and the planting of a lot of RINOs in his administration (hello Mike Pence), Trump was sent packing.

But Obama did not stop there. Using the new President Biden as a prop, he unleashed a mass campaign of lawfare against the former president. Phony felonies in four jurisdictions that could have led cumulatively to a 566.5-year prison term, corrupt prosecutors who ignored the law in their fever to, as NY’s AG Letitia James put it, “get Trump,” political judges who coached the juries to convict — all became a shameful stain on the American judicial tradition.

Carl Bernstein would never say this but I will: Obama’s extraordinary and unlawful interference in the ability of his successor to govern was far worse than Watergate. Richard Nixon was drummed out of office for covering up the botched robbery of some incompetent allies. Obama not only masterminded the coverup. He also inspired and encouraged the campaign of vitriol — Hitler, Hitler, Hitler — that led to at least two assassination attempts against candidate Trump in 2020 — that we know of.

What Obama did was wrong, and evil. But what his team never understood — in their smugness and arrogance and haste — was that all the slings and arrows they hurled at Trump only made him stronger. That Fulton County jailhouse mugshot they expected to topple Trump was so iconic the 47th president used as his official portrait in the early days of his second term, glaring down from government offices. Now he keeps it on the walls of the White House, I believe next to a framed photo of Biden’s autopen.

When he stood up on that stage in Butler PA, blood dripping down his face and raised his fist saying, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” — in that moment Trump became not only a candidate, and not only the front runner. He became a folk hero around the world, with a claim on history’s vindication. Because all who saw him turn his head at a certain angle at a certain time understood the hand of Providence had spared him.

That moment not only assured Trump’s re-election to the presidency for a second term, it fueled his conviction that God spared him for a reason — to Make American Great Again, to restore our nation’s sovereignty and patriotism, to upend the globalist agenda that Obama had led, one designed to take power from the people for the elites.

It is said that history is written by the victors. Our academies, our media institutions, our great publishing houses are all intoxicated with Marxism, socialism and radical left-wing ideology that supports biological men in women’s sports and an end to meritocracy. They will defend Obama to their deaths. But finally, one day, they will be replaced by clear-sighted Americans who see through the fog and salute the truth.

Then Obama’s pedestal will topple, his evil Machiavellian plots the stuff of legend.

When that happens the man named Barry Obama, born to a Kenyan father and an American mother, married to a woman who said she had never been proud to be an American until the country nominated her husband for president, this man of charm will be seen for what he was — a poser intent on turning our country into to a socialist dictatorship. He was the only ex-president in history to keep a residence in DC after his presidency, the better to work the levers of power.

And Donald J. Trump — brash businessman with flaws who gave his all for his people — will be seen for what he is: the man who rescued the country from an evil cabal of sorcerers and schemers and ignited a Golden Age of prosperity and peace.

Or anyway that’s the legacy I believe they both deserve.