Since he left office, Barack Obama has been careful not to directly comment on Donald Trump or his administration. With the exception of a fiery speech at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in September, the former president has not named Trump in his critiques of the administration. At the Obama Foundation summit in Chicago on Monday night, Obama went back to his method of taking aim at Trump without ever once uttering his name. But it was a good zinger nonetheless.
While employing the stern “we” used for toddlers in time-out, Obama said that our country’s problems with agriculture, education, sustainable energy, and more were not hard problems to fix, but: “the reason we don’t do it is because we are still confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues,” he said, per The Atlantic.
“You literally can remake the world right now, because it badly needs remaking,” he said in his speech, also referencing the failures of the Trump administration.
While plenty of people have taken aim at Trump with jabs at his “small hands,” hair, and other easy targets, Obama stayed highbrow with his comments about the Republican candidate in 2016. He simply warned then that Trump was “temperamentally unfit” for the job. But now it’s 2018, the midterms are over, Democrats took the House, and Trump is still president. It seems Obama is letting loose a little.
Obama would have been one of many to call out Trump’s daddy issue; Fred Trump is said to have dodged millions of dollars in tax payments to funnel money down to his children, and usually gets the credit for being the start of the Trump problem. The “mommy issues” idea, however, is much rarer, though not unfounded. As Vanity Fair’s Marie Brenner reported in 1990, his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, a Scottish immigrant, once uttered to Ivana Trump, “What kind of son have I created?”
