Barack Obama tore into Donald Trump during an interview published Monday where he said the president is a ‘Richie Rich’ type and far from the traditional ideal of American masculinity – like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, he noted.
‘I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up: the John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter. There was a code,’ Obama told The Atlantic, ‘the code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the ’30s and ’40s and before that.’
The former president said he thought if a ‘right-wing populist’ would rise to the presidency, he thought it would be someone ‘more appealing’ than Trump.
‘I’m not surprised that somebody like Trump could get traction in our political life. He’s a symptom as much as an accelerant,’ Obama said, adding: ‘But if we were going to have a right-wing populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.’
‘There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully—in fact he defends the vulnerable against bullies,’ Trump’s predecessor detailed of American manhood.
‘And so even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich—the complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure,’ Obama said.
Richie Rich was a comic character created in the 1950’s and was the world’s richest kid, getting anything he could possibly want – and was dubbed ‘the poor little rich boy.’ The comics were made into a TV cartoon and eventually were adapted into a movie starring Macaulay Culkin in the 1990’s.
Obama says Trump is more Richie Rich than John Wayne, nicknamed Duke, an actor who became a popular icon through his starring roles in Western films and whose expansive career spanned from the 1920-1970’s.
The former Democratic president said in his interview with The Atlantic, ‘I did not believe how easily the Republican establishment, people who had been in Washington for a long time and had professed a belief in certain institutional values and norms, would just cave’ to Trumpian populism.
He added, however, that the populist shift in the Republican Party really garnered traction in the 2008 election, when he and Joe Biden ran a successful campaign against John McCain and Sarah Palin.
‘The power of Palin’s rallies compared with McCain’s rallies—just contrast the excitement you would see in the Republican base,’ Obama noted. ‘I think this hinted at the degree to which appeals around identity politics, around nativism, conspiracies, were gaining traction.’
Obama and former first lady Michelle have become much more outspoken as the 2020 election approached, and since the results came back projecting Biden as the victor over Trump, they have upped their attacks on the sitting president.
Trump has still refused to concede to Biden, insisting he is the true winner of the election and claiming his lawsuits in several swing states will prove so in the coming weeks.
Two weekends ago, Biden declared victory after multiple media outlets called him the winner once enough states projected him winning their Electoral College votes – putting him over the 270 vote threshold needed to win the White House.
