Barack Obama Is Still Annoying

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, April 27, 2026

 

I am grateful to Barack Obama for popping up in my feed from time to time to remind me why I never liked him:

 

 

This message was built on top of a lie. At the time that this was posted — 5:15pm ET last night — we did, in fact, know “the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.” We knew it because the shooter’s manifesto had been published, and because every news outlet in the country had reported on it. Specifically, we knew that the suspect had said that he was profoundly opposed to President Trump, that he wanted to target officials in the Trump administration, and that he had been involved with various left-wing groups. By 5pm, these facts had been reported by CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, and a whole host of newspapers.

 

Perhaps Obama thinks that, politically, the suspect’s politics do not matter? That’s a defensible position. Perhaps, like me, he thinks that everyday rhetoric should not be blamed for the actions of zealots. That’s defensible, too. Perhaps he is opposed to collective punishment. That’s admirable — if true. But it is also irrelevant, because, instead of saying any of those things, Obama said, “we don’t yet have the details about the motives,” and this was in no sense true.

 

Why does this annoy me? It annoys me because, as was also neatly illustrated by his advocacy during Virginia’s recent redistricting push, Barack Obama has mastered the art of being a vicious partisan while pretending to be judicious. To this day, Obama is held up by a certain sort of political commentator as the gold standard of what a politician should be. He is no such thing. He is — and he always was — a brawler with solid PR. It is, indeed, virtuous to refuse to speculate on motives when those motives aren’t available. But, in this instance, the motive was available. It was just inconvenient. So Obama ignored it, and, in a tone that sounded lofty and responsible, he spread what in any other circumstance would be described as “misinformation.” This was not a one-off. He did this all through his presidency, and he has done it all through his post-presidency, too. He is not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.