Former President Barack Obama said he believes President Donald Trump’s attacks on him are “an obsession” and that Trump “knows better” than to insult him to his face.

In an interview released Wednesday on All The Smoke podcast, Obama was asked how he continues to “take the high road” under Trump’s unrelenting, yearslong preoccupation with him and his family.

“Look, you got to ask him what it is — the obsession,” Obama told the podcast hosts, former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. “I obviously, you know, have a room in his head — a suite — in his head.”

He added, “If this — whoever you were talking about — was in front of me, which has happened a couple times, he don’t talk like that. Cause he knows better.”

“And I think that filter of the phone creates a situation both where people just say kind of crazy stuff that they would never say to your face — with no consequences,” he said.

The two leaders were last seen publicly interacting at the funeral of Jimmy Carter, where they were seated next to each other and seen smiling and chatting.

Obama went on to take subtle jabs at the president, saying that when he held the office, he had little time to worry about his predecessors because the job required him be “constantly focused.” He also said that he wasn’t preoccupied with social media and cable TV, which are Trump’s outlets of choice.

“The idea that I’d be worrying about somebody who came before, and me trying to measure like what’s he done today — constantly worrying about that is a strange thing to me,” Obama said. “It shows me somebody who’s not focused on the American people and the job they’re supposed to do.”

The remarks come as Trump — who has long been fixated on the first Black president, dating back 15 years when he spread the racist “birther” lie that Obama wasn’t born in America — renewed his attacks on Obama as he has faced a series of setbacks.

Last week, during the Group of 7 summit in France, Trump mentioned Obama’s name two dozen times as he endeavored to cast his tenuous peace deal with Iran as superior to the one the former president brokered in 2015 — as criticism mounted, even among Trump’s allies, about how the deal was similar or worse.

At the summit, Trump referred to Obama in an expletive-laden rant about how Tehran responded to the 2015 deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.

“They tried to bribe their way out of it,” Trump said. “And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama, and they said, ‘He’s a stupid son of a bitch.’”

This week, Trump invoked the former president in an attempt to deflect blame over the failed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. And twice this month, as Obama prepared a high-profile rollout of his presidential library, Trump has depicted the project on his social media account as a pile of trash that he said would become “a ‘Mecca’ for those who hate America!”

Obama and his family have long been the target of Trump’s insults. Earlier this year, Trump posted a racist video on his social media account portraying Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes. He deleted the post and blamed it on a staffer but insisted he had nothing to apologize for.

In response to an inquiry about Obama’s remarks, Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, brought up the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal and called him “one of the weakest and worst presidents in history.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Erica L. Green/Jamie Kelter Davis
c. 2026 The New York Times Company