Is Barack Obama secretly running the Biden administration?

No, no he is not

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There’s a strange theory doing the rounds in conservative media which states that Barack Obama is secretly running the Biden administration. The thrust of the theory is that Joe Biden is completely senile, so Obama made sure that the Biden White House was stacked with his own people in 2021 and has been the brains of the operation ever since. Fox News’ Megyn Kelly has said that “there are a lot of people who think the Obamas are already running the government and that there is some sort of shadow puppet situation going on that they’re controlling”. Many other prominent voices on the right have echoed this same line of thought.

At the risk of taking this more seriously than it deserves, it’s worth flatly stating that there is no evidence that this is true. The American government is completely unsuited to this sort of arrangement because of its diffusion of power among hundreds of different agencies and its relative openness to the media. The political scientist Samuel Huntington observed long ago that the politics of the White House resemble the politics of a medieval court, with journalists and officials obsessively tracking the relative influence and favor of each courtier. The Biden White House is relatively leak-free compared to some of its predecessors, but we still get plenty of insight into its different factions and their disagreements. It is just inconceivable that somehow Barack Obama is standing above all of this pulling the strings and yet that fact is somehow invisible to everyone but Megyn Kelly and Newt Gingrich.

But I think this strange idea does tell us something interesting about today’s Republican Party. The part of this theory that really stands out for me is the idea that there is something inherently suspicious about the fact that many Biden White House officials also previously worked in the Obama White House. This is actually exactly what should happen. Officials get experience working in the White House under one president, then they go onto more senior roles under the next. The problem, I think, is that Republicans have become opposed to the very idea of experience or continuity in government. Now that the GOP likes to staff their administrations with sacked generals, toilet seat salesmen and Steve Bannon, they suddenly suspect there must be some secret motive for Biden to appoint experienced Democratic operatives to positions in his White House.

The fixation on attacking Obama is also reflective of how out of touch the conservative media sphere is with the country at large. If you spent the Obama years mired in the tan suit controversy or accusing him of “hating America”, you may have misssed the fact that Barack Obama is one of the most popular public figures in the country. He’s also significantly more popular than Joe Biden, which is why Biden always likes to talk about the “Obama-Biden administration” in order to remind voters of the connection between the two men. It seems strange that right-wing commentators want to do the same thing.

On the other hand, there are obvious reasons why the right is finding it hard to move beyond its fixation on Obama. They might half-heartedly try to convince us that Biden is senile, but they hated Obama, and there has been little sign of an appetite for transferring that hatred onto Biden, even on the right. Conservative book publishers have been disappointed that even right-wing audiences don’t want to buy books about Biden. He just doesn’t get the reactionary blood pumping in the way that only an African-American with the middle name Hussein can. Anti-Obama content will always have an audience on the right, even if the public at large rates him pretty highly.

Obama has also always been a magnet for conspiracy theories, ranging from the idea that he is secretly a Muslim on a mission to destroy America to the more prosaic notion that he was plotting to join Mexico and Canada in a “North American Union” and replace the dollar with a new currency called the Amero. Many right-wing commentators and fringe figures slipped easily from this sort of conspiracy into Trumpism, and the notion that Barack Obama is always up to something shady and must be stopped is deeply engrained in the right-wing psyche. The idea that he is still secretly running America is just the latest example of a long-running trend. The people who are advancing it deserve to be laughed out of public life forever.