Former President Donald Trump shared on Monday in New Hampshire that former President Barack Obama is secretly still in control of the White House.
“It’s never been worse than it is now under crooked Joe Biden and, frankly, his boss, Barack Hussein Obama,” Trump said before a crowd of his supporters. “I think it’s his boss.”
The conspiracy theory is not new, having been circulated online since 2020 when a clip of Obama on a late-night show said he would ideally have a stand-in with an earpiece so he could deliver lines while out of the spotlight.
Trump’s supporters have long been supporters of this conspiracy, using it to discredit the current administration following Trump’s loss in 2020.
Online, supporters of the conspiracy theory cut together clips of Biden administration members saying “President Obama” when meaning to say President Biden, insinuating the mistakes are Freudian slips.
While Trump has insinuated his belief in this conspiracy for some time, he has never come outright and said it.
“I don’t believe he’s smart enough to be doing this stuff,” Trump said about Biden during an Iowa campaign stop on Oct. 1. “I believe it’s the people that are surrounding him.”
Then, less than a week later, Trump made another comment seeming to allude to the notion of Obama being in control while speaking with conservative political commentator John Solomon.
“I don’t ever think he knows what’s going on,” Trump said of Biden. “I said Kevin [McCarthy]… I think this is the president’s, whoever the president is, it’s not yours.”
The conversation he recalled was with former Speaker McCarthy and had to do with his then ongoing budget negotiations with Biden.
However, on Monday Trump made it clear who he was alluding to, calling out his fellow former president by name, saying “This is obliteration, and Obama has plenty to do with it.”
“Obama has plenty to deal with. I call him, I call him Biden’s boss,” he said.