Maureen Dowd
Trump’s Obama
Derangement Syndrome
Feb. 7, 2026, 7:00 a.m. ET
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion
Columnist, reporting from Washington
It seems etymologically,
metaphysically, geologically and ethically impossible that President Trump
could reach a new low. But he has.
Every Friday, when I’m
planning my column, I find fresh evidence that the president is unfit for his
office. He taunts his foes in crude, creepy ways and tries to tattoo his name
on everything.
Late Thursday night, a
vile clip appeared on Truth Social, depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes
in a jungle cartoon, to the Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” It was at the
end of a video filled with baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
The man who pushed the despicable “birther” conspiracy is still at it, using a
racist meme from a far-right Pepe-the-frog-loving acolyte.
Like many of Trump’s
actions, it was both shocking and predictable.
As The Times reported, Trump has a “history of making degrading
remarks about people of color, women and immigrants,” and the Obamas in
particular, with “the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security
Department all having promoted posts that echo white supremacist messaging” in
his current term.
Karoline Leavitt, the
White House press secretary, offered a pathetic defense for our pathological
president: “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as
the king of the jungle and Democrats as characters from ‘The Lion King.’ Please
stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to
the American public.”
Well, Karoline, I think
Americans do care that your boss is a racist and off his rocker.
“His presidency is
enclosed in a bubble wrap of darkness and hatred and resentment,” Rahm Emanuel,
who served as Obama’s chief of staff, told me.
Once the White House
realized the outrage was real, the post was deleted. Officials blamed a
staffer, though you know Trump was in on it. On Wednesday, he said he does “retruth” conspiracy
theories himself.
He went so far that even
a few Republicans in Congress, looking down the barrel of the midterms,
objected.
On X, Tim Scott of South Carolina, the
only Black Republican in the Senate, called it “the most racist thing I’ve seen
out of this White House.”
Senator Katie Britt, an
Alabama Republican who has been increasingly put off by some of Trump’s offensive
actions, said on X, “This content was rightfully removed, should have never
been posted to begin with, and is not who we are as a nation.”
Trump had a
Dostoyevsky-esque moment on Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast in
Washington, when he confessed that his ego would not let him lose the 2020
race.
“You know, they rigged
the second election,” he said. “I had to win it, had to win it. I needed it for
my own ego. I would have had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really
have a big ego, though.”
He was admitting that
our ginned-up election integrity crisis was simply an exercise in bending the
truth to his bottomless vanity. “His ego could not handle the fact that he
lost, so he had to pretend there was a voting crisis,” David Axelrod told me. “The
world is still paying for that.”
(Trump also confessed to the religious
gathering that he gets annoyed when Speaker Mike Johnson asks to pray before
meals. Trump dryly noted: “I say, ‘Excuse me? We’re having lunch in the
Oval.’”)
After obscenely slapping
his name on everything from the Kennedy Center to a gold card for rich aspiring
immigrants to warships, and planning a gargantuan triumphal arch and an outsize
White House ballroom as reflections of his bloated ego, Trump is now trying to
strong-arm Congress into naming more things after him by holding
congressionally approved funds hostage.
The administration tried
extortion tactics on Chuck Schumer, threatening not to unfreeze billions for a
new railroad tunnel under the Hudson River unless he helped rename Penn Station
in New York and Washington Dulles International Airport after Trump.
Trump’s dragging his own
name and America’s name in the muck. The word “Trump” is an epithet in many
circles. But in a bizarre manifestation of insecurity, the president still
wants to stamp his moniker everywhere, just as he did when he was a New York businessman
prone to bankruptcy.
Trump had another
quintessential Trump moment on Tuesday when he lambasted CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for not smiling as
she asked him, in light of the latest release of Jeffrey Epstein filth, what he
would say to the pedophile’s survivors “who feel like they haven’t gotten
justice.”
He told her that it was time to move
on — the latest deflection from the fact that he has never come clean about his
association with the odious Epstein.
Like a shuddersome image
of worms slithering from underneath a rock, a bunch of powerful and formerly
respected people in America and beyond have been exposed by the Epstein files.
Many of the ultra-elite
who insisted they did not know the truth about Epstein’s depravity have been
unmasked as liars. Instead, as The Wall Street Journal wrote, prominent
people from Noam Chomsky to Stanley Pottinger to Peter Mandelson to Michael
Wolff “actively consoled him, cast him as a victim and in some cases offered
advice on how to rehabilitate his image.”
And the shoes keep
dropping. CNN reported on
Friday that Navy Secretary John Phelan was listed as a passenger on Epstein’s
private plane in 2006.
As The Times’s David
Fahrenhold told CNN, the louche role of some tech billionaires in the Epstein
scandal is particularly chilling because our lives in the coming years will be
defined by these billionaires.
Once we saw the lords of
the cloud as heroic — young geniuses who would improve our lives. Now, as
Fahrenthold said, the personal failings, insecurities and midlife crises of
these men are dictating the way they run their companies. We were, he said, “a little
bit misplaced in sort of putting our hopes in these folks.”
They are not keeping hope alive.
