A protester holds a Trump flag with puppets of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton tied to it in front of the Michigan Capitol on January 6, 2021. Photo / Nick Hagen, For The Washington Post
Obama and sometimes Clinton aim at Trump. Trump goes after Biden and Obama. It’s a rare battle of the presidents.
What began six months ago as a series of small flare-ups between current and former presidents has become a steady low-grade conflict.
Barack Obama says President Donald Trump has a “weak attachment to democracy”. Bill Clinton says people should be “worried” about Trump’s willingness to ignore the courts. George W. Bush indirectly criticises his dismantling of foreign aid programmes.
And Trump – not one to hold his fire – has suggested that Obama somehow helped write the “Epstein files” and is mishandling the construction of his presidential library. On Sunday night, Trump shared a social media message depicting Obama and many of his former advisers in fake mug shots, and an AI video showing Obama being arrested by FBI agents.
Trump also continues to assert, without evidence, that Joe Biden’s staffers used an autopen in a way that was a “crime” and a “conspiracy,” which Biden calls “ridiculous and false”.
This skirmishing among the select group of men who have held the nation’s highest office is a historical anomaly and is sending ripples through the political system.
“If not completely unprecedented, it’s aberrational,” said Barbara Perry, co-chair of the presidential oral history programme at the University of Virginia’s Miller Centre. “Ex-presidents feel that they are part of this exclusive club. There are so few people who have been president, and you share this common bond, a brotherhood of sorts. And that is bipartisan and in some ways nonpartisan.”
Not this time. Trump’s launch of an investigation into Biden, a political opponent, over the autopen violates democratic norms and comes as Biden is seeking to focus on his legacy. Some Democrats want Obama to speak out more forcefully, while he fires back that they should stop looking for a “messiah”. Bush, the only living former Republican president, is keeping a low profile as Trump reshapes the GOP in a way that reflects a broad rejection of his legacy and that of his father.
Senator Chris Coons (D-Delaware) said Trump is attacking the former presidents in large part because he needs enemies.
“Biden beat him and was a good president who delivered on things that Trump failed to deliver on - but he attacks Bush and Obama with equal flair,” Coons said. “Trump defines himself by who he fights and how he fights. He thrives on the drama of constant tension. A war of all against all, in order to keep people tuning in to the next episode, is how he runs his life.”
Trump’s supporters contend that his predecessors represent a failed system that has been rejected by voters, so it’s not surprising that tensions would erupt.
“Former Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden are all part of the same club that’s spent decades serving the corrupt DC establishment and protecting the failed status quo. President Trump wears their criticism as a badge of honour,” said White House spokeswoman Liz Huston. “President Trump remains the ultimate outsider, and he’s focused on keeping his promises to hardworking, patriotic citizens and making America greater than ever before.”
Obama’s role is among the most notable, as he seeks to present a counterpoint to Trump without becoming a high-profile spokesman for the opposition.
In a June 17 appearance in Hartford, Connecticut, Obama left little doubt how he views the Trump administration. “The system is captured by those who, let’s say, have a weak attachment to democracy - I don’t even think that’s a controversial statement at this point,” Obama said.
The United States, he added, is getting “dangerously close” to normalising autocratic behaviour, in part because so few people are pushing back on falsehoods like the notion that the 2020 election was rigged. “In one of our major political parties, you have a whole bunch of people who know that’s not true but will pretend like it is,” Obama said. “And that is dangerous.”
Clinton also has not been silent. He has been promoting The First Gentleman, his latest political thriller with James Patterson, and has been asked about Trump at his book events.
In a June 1 appearance on CBS Sunday Morning, Clinton took Trump to task for his cavalier attitude toward judicial rulings, and he predicted that voters will rebel if Trump continues on this path.
“Look, we’ve never seen anything like this before in my lifetime - somebody who says, ‘Whatever I want should be the law of the land. It’s my way or the highway,’” Clinton said. “And most Americans don’t agree with that.”
Biden has been playing defence as the Trump administration and congressional Republicans pursue investigations into whether he was so diminished that his staff used an autopen to improperly approve presidential decisions. They have provided no evidence, but the probes have prompted several Biden aides to invoke their Fifth Amendment rights.
Biden has blasted the claims as an attempted “distraction” from Trump’s “disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations”.
In a sense, the Democratic former presidents are stepping into the vacuum that confronts any party out of power. As Trump presses ahead with his sweeping, chaotic agenda, many Democrats view him as an existential threat and are hungry for someone to hit back.
Obama is in some ways a natural contender. A Gallup poll in January found that 96% of Democrats had a favourable view of Obama, and a survey a month earlier found that 84% of them said Obama was an outstanding or above-average president.
“My own view is that Obama, who is the most popular and probably most influential Democrat, should be very seriously considering speaking out more and giving voice to the values and the vision of the Democratic Party on a steadier basis,” said Alex Keyssar, a historian at the Harvard Kennedy School. “I’m sympathetic to the idea that it needs to be done, and he may be uniquely positioned to do it.”
At a recent Democratic fundraiser in New Jersey, Obama focused not only on Trump’s actions – “I mean, that’s who he is” – but also on Democrats who, he suggested, are spending too much time hand-wringing and not enough fighting back.
“I think it’s going to require a little bit less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions,” Obama said, according to excerpts released by his office. “And it’s going to require Democrats to just toughen up.”
On the other hand, just 4% of Democrats in a CNN poll in March volunteered Obama’s name as the leader who best reflects the party’s core values. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) was named by 10%, former Vice-President Kamala Harris by 9% and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) by 8% – bolstering the notion that the party lacks a clear leader.
This is not the first time presidents and ex-presidents have gone after one another, although usually the attacks have been more sporadic and less personal. At the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Clinton, who by then had been out of office for four years, levelled a sharp attack on Bush, a Republican seeking reelection, accusing him of squandering the country’s unity after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
But those critiques were broad arguments made as part of well-established political rituals, bearing little resemblance to today’s hard-hitting exchanges.
As Trump faces growing pressure to release material related to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, for example, he has lashed out on a Truth Social post at Obama, Biden and other officials. “Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration?” Trump wrote.
The post was part of Trump’s ongoing drumbeat about his fellow presidents. On June 1, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, “President Obama was a terrible president. President Biden was the worst president in the history of our country. President Bush should not have gone into the Middle East and blow the place up, so I don’t give him high marks either.”
Trump’s criticism of Biden in particular has become so reflexive that he recently slammed his predecessor for appointing Jerome H. Powell, even though it was Trump himself who appointed the Federal Reserve chairman. Powell has displeased Trump by not lowering interest rates.
Andrew Bates, a Democratic strategist who worked in Biden’s White House, said Trump is levelling his attacks in an effort to change the subject. “He is eager to talk about his predecessor and anyone else because he knows that his support is cratering and the prices he ran on lowering on are going up,” Bates said.
Coons said Biden has been judicious about firing back, especially given the direct nature of Trump’s attacks.
“Trump has been so aggressive and so personal and so biting,” Coons said. “If you are a newly-elected president and you are criticising your predecessor’s policies, that strikes me more as fair game. But … Trump has made his attacks on Biden so personal and so persistent that it’s hard to ignore them.”
Trump has been slower to attack Bush, the only living former Republican President. But he and his aides have been clear that they view Bush’s decision to launch the Iraq War in 2003 as a historic blunder, an issue that flared up after Trump’s decision last month to bomb Iran.
For his part, Bush has been notably quiet as Trump has remade the Republican Party that Bush and his father built, demolishing such longtime Republican principles as free trade and low deficits. But after Trump dismantled the US Agency for International Development, Bush recorded a video with Obama and others thanking USAID employees for their contribution to the country.
“You’ve shown the great strength of America through your work, and that is our good heart,” Bush said.
Bush spoke on the video with particular emotion about PEPFAR, the global Aids-fighting initiative he created that Trump has sought to cut. “This program shows a fundamental question facing our country: Is it in our national interest that 25 million people who would have died now live?” Bush said. “I think it is.”
As the ex-presidents continue trying to calibrate the aggressiveness of their responses to Trump’s onslaught, Keyssar emphasised the novelty of the entire exercise. Presidents have always been courteous even when taking office after a predecessor whose agenda they reject, he said.
“Eisenhower did not blame Roosevelt or Truman, and in fact ended up accepting the New Deal,” Keyssar said. “Neither Kennedy nor Johnson attacked Eisenhower. Nixon did not attack the Democrats, saying Vietnam was their war.”
At the New Jersey fundraiser, Obama told Democrats they should not look to former presidents or anyone else to lead them out of the wilderness. Rather, he said, they should focus on winning critical races this November and next year.
“Stop looking for the quick fix. Stop looking for the messiah,” Obama said. “You have great candidates running races right now. Support those candidates.”
Scott Clement contributed to this report.