It seems that former US President Barack Obama took a veiled dig at 77-year-old US President Donald Trump. The former president said that ‘80% of world’s problems involve old men hanging on to power.’
He said that the etching their names on everything, including pyramids.
In a conversation with the British historian David Olusuga on Friday, the former President said, “It’s fair to say that 80 per cent of the world’s problems involve old men hanging on who are afraid of death and insignificance, and they won’t let go. They build pyramids and they put their names on everything. They get very anxious about it.”
Obama’s remarks were seen in the context of Trump’s move to deploy National Guard troops in the Washington, DC, area.
Last month, Trump ordered a federal takeover of DC through an executive order declaring a “crime emergency” in the city. The move placed the city’s police department under federal control and deployed federal agents — including personnel from the DEA, ICE, FBI, and Secret Service — onto the streets, despite a sharp drop in crime since 2023, according to The Hill.
Currently, roughly 800 D.C. National Guard troops are deployed in the capital. They will be joined by about 200 personnel from Mississippi, between 300 and 400 from West Virginia, 150 from Ohio, and 200 from South Carolina, beefing up a presence that has largely remained idle around low-crime, tourist-heavy areas in the city, The Hill reported.
Critics have described the effort as a photo op and an act of militarizing Washington, DC. Mayor Muriel Bowser pushed back against Trump’s characterization of the city, saying: “We don’t have any authority over the D.C. Guard or any other guards, but I think it makes the point that this is not about DC crime. The focus should be on violent crime. Nobody is against focusing on driving down any level of violence. And so if this is really about immigration enforcement, the administration should make that plain.”
