Though former President Barack Obama has been out of office for nearly a decade, his name continues to be a fixture among President Donald Trump‘s MAGA world. Last week, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., evoked the name of America’s first Black president in a gripe over his father not having a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in striking peace deals from the Middle East to East-Central Africa.
“Affirmative action is when Barack Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize instead of Donald Trump,” Trump Jr. posted last week on X.
During a recent interview with theGrio, Democratic U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas said she actually agrees with Trump Jr.—but for a completely different reason.
“If we are going to say that there’s any affirmative action, I mean, I may have to agree with Donald Trump Jr., in the sense that it would take Obama being 50,000 times better than [President Trump] for him to get it,” Crockett said of President Obama, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” particularly for his outreach to the Muslim international community.
Crockett described Obama as “next level” and said that throughout both his presidencies, Trump “continues to chase President Obama’s shadow.”
The popular congresswoman explained, “He is so disturbed that a Black man is and was better than him,” adding, “They are not the same.”
Referring to the AI tool, Grok, Crockett said that if you were to ask it about the “education and qualification” of both Trump and Obama, “I can guarantee you that Grok would also say that Barack Obama had more education and qualifications than Donald Trump.”
During the same interview with theGrio, the Texas attorney-turned-congresswoman argued the same about her own qualifications after the president called her a “seriously Low IQ individual.”
Trump had previously emphasized educational background as crucial in determining a president’s qualifications for the job and had previously suggested Obama was a “terrible student,” despite graduating from two Ivy League schools: Columbia and Harvard Universities.
Crockett accused Trump and his MAGA base of pushing a sense of “white victimization,” and argued that the differences between him and Obama could not be more clear.
“There is nothing great about Donald Trump being born with a silver spoon in his mouth. What is great about Barack Obama is that he rose to the same level as Donald Trump, and nobody gave him millions of dollars when he was born,” Crockett told theGrio.
Referring to claims that Trump’s father, Fred Trump, helped him get into college, “Nobody had it guaranteed in the bag that they could pick up the phone and make sure that he can make it into school.” Crockett added that Trump and company are “still mad that the Obamas, in general, have made it into Harvard.”
By comparison, she said, “It seemed like the Trumps are on the struggle bus.”
“These are people who are really trying to prove that they are on the same level. And the reality is that if a Black man became president, he was always going to have to be far superior to anybody else,” asserted Crockett.
Pointing out Trump’s criminal record, she added, “You tell me whether or not Barack Obama ever would have gotten elected with one felony accusation, let alone 34 felony convictions.”
