President Trump can’t stop talking about Barack Obama amid war in Iran

“Obama has not had a single achievement domestically or internationally that Donald Trump has not taken a swipe at,” Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross tells theGrio.

Since President Donald Trump launched strikes in Iran and engaged in a widening military operation, resulting in the deaths of at least 13 U.S. service members, there is perhaps no one who is on the president’s mind more than former President Barack Obama.

To date, President Trump has mentioned his predecessor at least 17 times during at least six official public events since the Feb. 28 joint U.S.-Israel strikes in Iran. He’s also mentioned President Obama numerous times in countless social media posts. In nearly every mention, the president has repeated some variation of how Obama’s 2015 arms deal with Iran, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was the “worst deal” in combating Iran’s nuclear threat.

“The other thing was Barack Hussein Obama made maybe the worst deal I’ve ever seen because he gave all power in the Middle East to Iran,” Trump said in his first live public remarks since Operation Epic Fury was launched.

Trump has also repeatedly focused on the Obama administration’s delivery of cash to Iran via plane as part of the JCPOA–a total of $1.7 billion.

“They took the seats out, and they put cash, and it was so much that there wasn’t a bank in Virginia, Maryland, or D.C. that had any money left. They stripped them of all their money, put it into place, [and] sent it to Iran almost as ransom,” Trump said on Tuesday, March 17.

While it is true that the Obama administration delivered multiple cash payments to Iran as part of its strategic deal to deter Iran’s nuclear proliferation, it’s worth clarifying that the funds delivered to the Islamic state belonged to Iran. The U.S. was simply returning Iran’s own frozen assets that were initially sanctioned to cripple the country’s nuclear program. U.S. sanctions banned Iran from using the U.S. financial system, making electronic transfers impossible.

The president has also called out Obama on non-Iran-related topics, such as accusing him of not wanting a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office, and complaining that, unlike him, President Obama’s nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court never ruled against his administration. During a White House event celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, Trump again mentioned Obama, noting that a White House assistant physician who worked for both the Trump and Obama administrations said Trump was the healthiest president he had ever worked for. It’s worth noting that the physician, Colonel James Jones, appeared to have been pressured by Trump.

“Obama has not had a single achievement domestically or internationally that Donald Trump has not taken a swipe at, and part of that is because Obama’s appeal from the beginning of his administration, even before he got elected, remains very strong, even today, and Trump is watching his wane,” Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross told theGrio. “He has been in a consistent, competitive race with Obama and Obama’s legacy since he got elected. The only thing that brought Donald Trump into the political sphere was this push to ensure that the legacy of the first Black president was going to be diminished.”

Victor LaGroon, a U.S. Army veteran who worked as an intelligence analyst and a former Biden administration official, told theGrio, “Donald Trump has had some level of resentment and grievance with President Obama, even going back to being one of those birth life deniers and saying that he wasn’t a U.S. citizen…think you see this also in his obsession with a Nobel Peace Prize, because President Obama was awarded one.”

Despite Trump’s incessant digs at President Obama’s Iran deal, national security and foreign policy experts argue that the multinational agreement kept the Middle East region and, subsequently, the U.S. and its allies safe.

“There were some concerns about [Iran] developing weapons-grade plutonium, and thinking about how they could utilize this from a terroristic standpoint,” LaGroon explained.

Cross noted that what was remarkable about President Obama’s Iran deal is that it was achieved in partnership with allied nations.

“I think that we have to really understand the importance of that, because Donald Trump has done everything as a United States of one man, instead of bringing in the other nation states, instead of bringing in the power players in the [United Nations] and understanding that America cannot go it alone,” she told theGrio. “Donald Trump does not value diplomacy, and he especially doesn’t value the diplomacy of Barack Obama. Part of it is because he does not believe in the strength of the minds of Black people in general, and we’ve seen that he doesn’t believe that they should be in leadership positions, and he still does not take into any level of account that Barack Obama deserved to be President of the United States.”

LaGroon noted that it was especially noteworthy that Obama managed to get Russia and China to sign on to the JCPOA, telling theGrio, “It was pretty incredible.”

By contrast, LaGroon described President Trump’s current military operation in Iran as “Super chaotic.”

“The President goes into this war, and he does not consider any of his intelligence. He made a claim eight months ago that we obliterated, his words, any ability for [Iran] to have any nuclear access or weaponry. And now he says this is the reason why the threat of the thing we say they destroyed is why we went back into Iran and started bombing these people again,” said LaGroon. “President Donald Trump has to reconcile why [he] went away from this agreement that was working.”

Since striking Iran, there has been political and economic fallout in the United States. Gas prices, airline prices, and mortgage rates have skyrocketed, and a majority of Americans do not support the current war in Iran. On Tuesday, the Trump administration also saw its first resignation over the Iran war. In a letter to the president, Joseph Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said he could not in “good conscience” support the ongoing war, citing that the Middle Eastern adversary “posed no imminent threat to our nation.”

On Wednesday, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was grilled by Congress on the assessment claim that Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S. and Israel. Gabbard notably said no intelligence showed that Iran had made any effort to rebuild their enrichment capability since the Trump administration’s strikes on their nuclear facilities last summer.

Ultimately, Trump’s war in Iran stands to cost him and Republicans politically.

“They are at a point where the affordability concerns have reached their peak, and for this president to act as though his actions in the Middle East do not impede them, even further, I think, is a huge miscalculation on his part, because he cannot message his way out of a higher cost of living,” said Cross.