http://www.salon.com/2017/08/25/operation-obama-eclipse-trump-tweet-confirms-his-singleminded-obsession-with-that-other-president/
"Trump’s racist obsession with delegitimizing Obama has now lasted longer than at least one of his marriages. In 2011, he started flogging the “birther” conspiracy theory, using his status as a reality TV show star to inject insinuations into the mainstream media that Obama was not a native-born American. A month after Trump started pushing this idea, which is rooted in the racist refusal to accept black Americans as full citizens, Obama released his long-form birth certificate. This didn’t slow Trump down, however, because birtherism was never about facts. It was just an excuse to push the narrative that is dear to Trump’s heart: A black president cannot, by definition, be a real president. Now he’s in the White House, but Trump’s obsession with un-making Obama’s presidency hasn’t let up one bit. Earlier this month, Alberto Nardelli of BuzzFeed reported that European diplomats understand Trump’s hatred of Obama as the central organizing feature, and perhaps the only relevant aspect, of his foreign policy decision-making. “It’s his only real position,” one of the diplomats told BuzzFeed. “He will ask: ‘Did Obama approve this?’ And if the answer is affirmative, he will say: ‘We don’t.’ He won’t even want to listen to the arguments or have a debate. He is obsessed with Obama.” As Jack Moore at GQ observed, a view of Trump’s presidency proves this diplomat’s assertions right. The Paris climate agreement, various trade deals, the Clean Power Plan, transgender people in the military — the list goes on. Some of these items were priorities for the Republican Party; some, such as the transgender ban, were not. What they all have in common is that Trump’s decisions attempt to undo whatever Obama, and the current president’s only important goal is to erase from history the fact that we ever had a black man in the Oval Office. He will fail, of course. Trump doesn’t have a time machine and even more to the point, every day he is in office, the country longs for Obama more and more."
