President Donald Trump made a petty dig at former President Barack Obama on Wednesday morning, reviving the Democrat’s remarks from a decade ago that the billionaire would never be U.S. president.
On Truth Social on Wednesday morning, the president, 79, shared a screenshot of a meme first posted on X.
The meme depicts Trump smirking at Obama during his 2017 inauguration. “When you see the guy who said ‘you’ll never be president’ at your inauguration,” the photo’s caption read.
“Twice,” the initial poster wrote in a post on X.
The post from Trump appeared to be an apparent attempt to self-soothe after Obama rubbed the Trump administration’s nose in its own failure in the wake of the Hungarian election.
The jab dates back to 2016, when Obama said he believed Trump would never be the leader of the U.S. because it’s a “serious job.”
“I continue to believe that Mr Trump will not be president. And the reason is because I have a lot of faith in the American people,” Obama, who was president at the time, declared.
Being president is “not hosting a talk show or a reality show, it’s not promotion, it’s not marketing, it’s hard,” the former president said at the ASEAN Summit in California.
“It’s not a matter of pandering and doing whatever will get you in the news on a given day,” Obama added.
Trump immediately brushed off Obama’s remarks and flipped his prediction into a political jab against him.
“This man has done such a bad job—he has set us back so far—for him to say that is actually a great compliment, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told supporters at the time.
The pair clash frequently online, with Trump making headlines in February for posting a racist video of Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama depicted as apes on his Truth Social account. He later blamed a staffer for the post.
The video sparked widespread backlash online, while White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt bizarrely scrambled to defend Trump.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from ‘The Lion King’,” Leavitt said.
It’s unclear what brought on Trump’s latest swipe against Obama, but the president may be displeased with Obama’s celebration of the loss of autocrat Viktor Orban in Hungary on Sunday.
Orban, a far-right figure and longtime ally of Trump, conceded defeat to center-right rival Peter Magyar and his Tisza party on Sunday, after 16 years in power.
Trump had been posting on Truth Social before the election, urging people to vote for Orban, whom he has described as “a true friend” and his “twin” in Europe. Orban has described Trump as “the man who can save the Western world.”
As part of his efforts to campaign for Orban, Trump sent Vice President JD Vance to Hungary days before the election. Vance called the Hungarian leader a “wise and smart” man, while describing his authoritarian regime as a “model for the continent.”
At one point during his visit, Vance even called the president from his rally in Budapest to put him on speaker phone but Trump didn’t pick up on the first attempt.
Despite their efforts, Orban’s Fidesz party lost more than half of its seats amid a record-breaking turnout of almost 80 percent.
Obama celebrated Magyar’s win, hailing it as “a victory for democracy, not just in Europe but around the world.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
