Former President Barack Obama made sharp remarks in London this week that many interpreted as a pointed jab at 79-year-old President Donald Trump. Speaking at the O2 Arena on Wednesday, Obama joined British historian David Olusoga for a wide-ranging conversation that touched on the subject of aging world leaders.
“It’s fair to say that 80 percent of the world’s problems involve old men hanging on who are afraid of death and insignificance, and they won’t let go,” Obama said. “They build pyramids, and they put their names on everything, and they get very anxious about it.”
Olusoga responded, “History is not short of those figures. Neither is the present.” Obama, 64, has returned to this theme before. At a private event in Singapore in 2019, he said, “If you look at the world and look at the problems, it’s usually old people, usually old men, not getting out of the way.”
He added in London that political leaders should remember they are “there to do a job” and “not there for life” or to “prop up your own sense of self-importance or your own power.”
The timing of the comments drew added attention since Obama was recently included in Trump’s newly unveiled “Presidential Walk of Fame” in the White House Rose Garden. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, was represented there by a photo of an autopen.
The London event, titled “An Evening with President Barack Obama,” drew a crowd of 14,000. Beyond the discussion of aging leaders, Obama also criticized Trump’s recent comments linking Tylenol use during pregnancy to autism. Trump’s claims, widely dismissed by medical experts, became a focus of Obama’s remarks.
“We have the spectacle of my successor in the Oval Office making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproved,” Obama said. He warned that such statements undermine public health and create unnecessary anxiety for expectant mothers and parents of autistic children. “All of that is violence against the truth,” he added.
Obama also expressed concern about broader political trends in the United States. He pointed to what he described as the belief that “‘we the people’ is just some people, not all people, and where there are some pretty clear hierarchies in terms of status and who ranks where.”
He cautioned that “creeping authoritarian tendencies” must be resisted. The evening highlighted Obama’s ongoing willingness to weigh in on global politics and American leadership while drawing clear contrasts with his successor.
Obama says Trump’s Tylenol announcement was ‘violence against the truth’
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