Obama reveals major Trump frustration to close confidants

Barack Obama has faced criticism from fellow Democrats over his perceived lack of activism during the Donald Trump political era, but he's privately "frustrated" that he can't do more.

The New Yorker took a deep dive into the life of the 64-year-old former president after he left the White House nearly a decade ago, and one of his confidants told the magazine that Obama is certain he could have beaten Trump in a one-on-one election.

“He’s frustrated,” said Ben Rhodes, who served as Obama’s deputy national security adviser and is now a consultant for him.

Rhodes said Obama has made comments to the effect of “I’d love to just be in the ring with this guy," but both men are constitutionally prohibited from running for a third term.

"In fact, there is little that Obama has left unsaid about Trump in the past fifteen years," wrote magazine correspondent Peter Slevin. "He and Michelle had prime-time roles at the Democratic National Conventions in 2020 and 2024, where they made clear their abhorrence of the man who rose to political prominence through his lies about Obama’s birth and, once in office, laid waste to so many values that they had done their best to honor."

"Michelle has felt particularly liberated in speaking her mind," Slevin added. "At the 2024 Convention, she posed a stark question about Trump: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”

Rhodes said Obama has recently been spending "hundreds and hundreds of hours, quite literally," studying questions about artificial intelligence, a topic that has interested him since his own presidency, and sources told Slevin that he played a behind-the-scenes role in developing Biden’s 2023 executive order on the tech.

“Anyone working to harness the power of these new tools has to make a choice: ignore potential problems until it’s too late, or proactively address them,” Obama wrote at the time.

Trump, however, rescinded Biden’s order on the day he returned to office, but Obama said he plans to formulate an AI agenda for lawmakers and researchers.

"How do we have a smart, enforceable strategy for steering this toward the common good, as opposed to just private gain?" Obama told the magazine. "If we do not have an agenda for that, then I think some of the populist impulses that have been there already can go in all kinds of stray directions that are either not going to be particularly successful in helping ordinary people or can reinforce some of the anti-democratic trends that we’ve already seen.”