When Barack Obama appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Tuesday, May 6, the conversation started lighthearted—Colbert joked about possibly running for president himself. But Obama’s response cut straight to the heart of what’s been gnawing at him for months: the office he once held has fundamentally changed, and not for the better.
Obama didn’t mince words. Asked how ridiculous it would be for Colbert to run, he said simply:“The bar has changed.”When Colbert immediately shot back that it’s“subterranean,”Obama laughed and agreed. Then came the real sting:“I think that you could perform significantly better than some folks that we’ve seen.”The implication was unmistakable, and the audience knew it. This wasn’t Obama endorsing Colbert for office—he made that clear—but it was a stinging assessment of the current presidency.
What makes this moment significant isn’t just the dig at Donald Trump, though that’s certainly part of it. It’s the window it opens into why Obama can’t seem to step away from politics despite wanting to. In a profile published just two days earlier in The New Yorker, Obama admitted that Trump’s presidency has pulled him back into the political arena far more than he’d prefer. The weight of the moment—the stakes as he sees them—won’t let him rest. His wife Michelle wants him to ease up, to actually enjoy their lives together, but he feels compelled to stay engaged.“It creates a genuine tension in our household,”he told the magazine, and you can hear the frustration there, both his and hers.
The absurdity of modern politics came into sharp relief when Obama addressed the ongoing beef with Trump over aliens. Back in February, Obama had casually revealed that aliens are real, which set Trump off. Trump accused him of divulging classified information, insisting Obama“made a big mistake.”On Tuesday night, Obama’s response was comedy gold: if the government actually had proof of aliens,“some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with one of the aliens and sent it to his girlfriend to impress them. It would leak.”It’s the kind of joke that lands because it’s true—in an age where nothing stays secret, the idea that we’re harboring alien spacecraft is laughable.
But here’s what lingers after the laughs fade: Obama’s desperation to step back, tangled with his sense that he can’t. He’s stuck in a loop where his desire to help keep him in the arena, even as it strains the life he actually wants to live. That’s the real story—not the witty one-liners or the shade thrown at the current president, but the exhaustion of a man who thought he could finally rest and discovered he couldn’t.
What do you think drives former leaders back into the political fight, even when they’ve explicitly said they want to retire?
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Local Lawton
Local Lawton is a contributor to LocalBeat, covering local news and community stories.