Opening of Obama Presidential Center. Screengrab from video posted to YouTube.
Any consideration of the newly opened Obama Presidential Center calls for a review of the Obama administration’s record of action. The building and its grounds are inconceivable outside of this context, and the record will have to be given more attention. Revisiting the Obama policy program is surprising in that it shows how little has truly changed. The remarkable feature of this program in 2026 is its clear consistency with the lawlessness and authoritarianism of Donald Trump. Yet the tone and the packaging are clearly different. If Obama seemed somewhat embarrassed to continue shredding the Constitution and governing by executive decree, Trump is proud of the office’s unlimited power. This week as this “monument to the former president’s ego” opened for business, Donald Trump told Axios that there are no limits to his power.
Obama says this isn’t about nostalgia. Nostalgia for what, though? The politics of Donald Trump, but in sheep’s clothing and explained away more politely and compellingly? Barack Obama might as well be a professional actor; the Barack Obama of the Obama Center and of the inspiring speeches around its opening has never existed as anything more than the expensive fabrication of political operatives and public relations hacks. The real man is another American emperor. More charming and erudite, but no less an instrument of the world’s most destructive empire. It’s almost as if Americans don’t know that political power is about what one does rather than what he says. But we value appearances above all else.
Like the man himself, the Obama Center is pure storytelling artifice. It is gimmickry and branding. If the Obamas were trying to embarrass themselves and us, they couldn’t have done better: the Obama Foundation told the project’s architect that they “wanted something ‘iconic’ which isn’t how we’ve worked before. I don’t think you can design something to be iconic.” Noting that some have compared the structure to a “Klingon prison,” The Guardian’s architecture and design critic writes, “Rising above the low-rise, low-income neighbourhood, the building has an ominous presence, its mostly windowless heft recalling a menacing sci-fi headquarters, with small chamfered openings suggesting portals from where drones might be launched, or lasers fired.” The unwholesome thing already has a reputation for seeming “funereal.” Discussing this need to appear deep and “iconic,” Architectural Record says, “Unfortunately, metaphors, no matter how noble their aspirations, rarely translate legibly into architecture.”
The actions of the U.S. government during Barack Obama’s two terms (2009-2017) opened all people to real peril and perhaps fatally undermined the possibility of a free, fair society in this country in anything like the near term. These actions further eroded normative and legal constraints on executive power and on the public rhetoric of political leaders. If it does anything, the Obama Center reminds us that the social and political costs of the long list of post-9/11 constitutional and human rights abuses are only now becoming clear, and that we have not yet seen the worst.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence determined that pervasive secrecy around illegal detention, interrogation, and targeted-killing programs reduced public corrective pressure, with norms degrading out of sight for years. We have a chance, if we want it, to reckon with the illegal and aggressive wars of choice, based on cooked intelligence and outright lies; with the government’s endorsement of illegal indefinite detention and torture programs the world over (notwithstanding claims that the torture had ended); and with the normalization of secrecy, unconstitutional surveillance, and even the extrajudicial murder of American citizens. The outright horror of Donald Trump, and it is truly horrible, is an effect of decline and dissipation, not their cause. This is where a bloated, corrupt, and profoundly destructive imperial system lands a country and people. We have allowed our rulers to govern by permanent emergency for decades, shredding the Bill of Rights and violating international law with impunity. When we celebrate the Obama Center, we celebrate our own gullibility and lack of political power. We celebrate just those things that led us to this point in our history.
No doubt many civil liberties groups and progressive media outlets condemned the Obama administration’s murders of American citizens. But there was certainly no mass political or electoral condemnation or movement against Obama over this shocking break with precedent. His approval ratings remained high through the period of the story breaking. What could shock us now? Americans don’t seem to care much about much of anything outside of popular culture, rabid, meaningless consumption, and appearing to be rich. Within this social context, a Donald Trump or someone similar was inevitable. It is clear that our failure to contest Obama’s lawless and authoritarian practices on substantive grounds—our total inability to properly oppose his kill lists, ramped-up deportations, and unconstitutional mass surveillance—further entrenched a political culture of mindless reality TV, in which Trump could inherit and intensify these authoritarian apparatuses without real pushback.
The pushback is contained by the entertainment spectacle we mistake for politics. Contrary to popular belief (across the U.S. political spectrum), once Americans learned of the imperial presidency, there was a concerted movement to normalize these undemocratic, authoritarian structures. Because Bush and Obama’s deep, material violations of the Constitution and our broader political norms were not treated as red lines, the executive branch became even more powerful and insulated from accountability and political contest. Because Americans have not understood what we are watching play out, because we lack a real criticism of the state and our overall political economy, we have tended to direct our outrage at the symbolic and vibe-based. Politics as a serial drama, but little more. We got Trump precisely because we were not, and still are not, prepared to face the real issues.
As a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights told a federal district court at the time, “Not only does the administration claim to have sweeping power to target and kill U.S. citizens anywhere in the world, but it makes the extraordinary claim that the court has no role in reviewing that power or the legal standards that apply.” Many of our friends and neighbors slept through the warnings then. If they understand much better today, it is hard to know. And if they now see the connection between such open contempt for the American people and the Donald Trump era, then it is likewise difficult to say. As the ACLU said ten years ago:
Both the Bush and Obama administrations have consistently used claims of secrecy to shield from accountability the people who oversaw the CIA’s torture program. In every case brought by victims, government lawyers demanded that the victims’ claims be dismissed at the outset so as not to expose “state secrets.” As a senator and candidate, Obama criticized the Bush administration’s use of secrecy to block lawsuits. But to the dismay of many, Obama’s Department of Justice carried on the same policies.
Barack Obama’s immigration regime forcefully separated thousands of families, an outcome procedures by deliberate policy choices, regardless of whether the administration explicitly described what it was doing as a “family-separation policy.” The Obama administration presided over 3.1 million ICE deportations, and millions of American children have a parent who is an undocumented immigrant. By even the most conservative estimates, many hundreds of thousands of families were separated through these record-breaking deportations. If Barack Obama’s language and policy tools were not precisely those of Donald Trump, the outcome for these families was nonetheless separation. Calling Obama’s policy something other than what it was is to indulge a fantasy and to create a distinction cynically, for the purpose of papering over the horrors of such choices.
As has become legendary, the Obama years were a boon for the top 1 percent of Americans in terms of wealth. Over his full tenure, both personal wealth and income either stagnated or declined for the vast majority of Americans, with the “recovery” deeply skewed to the top 1 percent and then the top 10 percent, as the bottom 90 percent saw their share of all wealth decline. True to form, Obama paid lip service, identifying inequality as “the defining challenge of our time,” even as he oversaw these increases in inequalities of wealth and income. The point is not that these results are attributable only to Barack Obama or his choices; it is that he is only a representative of a political and economic system that largely doesn’t notice or care who occupies the White House.
Although we like to flatter ourselves by pretending that we live in unprecedented times, as to many of these core questions we live in ordinary times, and our problems are the problems of old, heavily precedented and even expected. The Obama Center is another monument to the power, greed, and profligacy of a criminal ruling class. It isn’t the first or the last. It symbolizes not any socially progressive impulse, whatever progress means within our cultural context, but the contempt of the rich and powerful for people who work without rest and still can’t afford the basic means of life. It is hypocrisy and self-congratulation made into a philosophy and a concrete building. The earliest budgets for the Obama monstrosity put the all-in total at around $300 million. It has landed, at least for now, at $850 million, with at least $200 million of that coming from taxpayers. When all is said and done, the price of this monument to the imperial presidency could be more than $1 trillion. This “Obamalisk” is a disgrace. It is an eyesore and evidence of our culture’s sickness, planted in a place with such deep need all around it. It is an open, shameless insult to the South Side.
Bad speeches naturally ensued at the opening ceremony. Michelle Obama said of Barack that he was always focused on the long view. But what long view? Or maybe whose? His two terms in office saw illegal acts of war in no fewer than seven countries, mass deportations and cruel family separations, a hardening militarized police and surveillance state, and the most extreme inequality in human history. This shockingly ugly and offensive building is not a “monument to choice,” but to political oppression at home, empire, murder, and starvation abroad. It is a monument to steady attacks on free speech and expression, and to ever-worsening conditions of life for our neighbors. Like all of our political leaders, everything Barack Obama said in congratulating himself and his time in the White House he contradicted with his actions during the same period. The embarrassing hypocrisy of the speech should be the story, but it won’t be. The structure stands first and foremost for the socially destructive collusion between the state and capital. “The foundation collected six donations of $50 million-plus,” one of which, for $100 million, came from Jeff Bezos. The notion of celebrating any of this would be anathema to a free and self-respecting people. But Americans celebrate what we’re told to, when we’re told to. And the Obamas are the good guys in the show.
As noted, the critical reception of the structure has been harsh, notably so against the backdrop of elite self-satisfaction and celebrity fanfare. The Obama Center has shown its true face in spite of itself, a “cold and forbidding” face. As the New York Times says, “That’s a jarring vibe for a project whose most groundbreaking ambition is to reimagine the presidential library as a warm, welcoming community hub.” It is “the tallest monument yet to presidential self-glorification,” its “tower loom[ing] like a castle keep.” It has elsewhere been likened to a “blind, ominous alien spacecraft,” and having visited the place, I can attest that it is even worse than the critics say. I’d suggest that this is the detached, unfeeling finished product Barack Obama wanted, whether he knows it or not. As the Architectural Recordreview notes:
The tower is emphatically opaque, giving little hint of the spaces within. And its solid, sculpted silhouette, rendered at the request of a demanding client, suggests mass rather than volume. This works in tandem with its opacity to evoke a brooding, monolithic gravitas. That may be an unlikely look for the OPC’s upbeat goal of inspiring people to change the world. But it seems eminently appropriate for a civic monument to a man who, like the tower, is famously aloof and inscrutable.
This is in keeping with Obama’s real legacy: we misrecognize the man, his values, and his politics. Presented as an agent of change, he helped naturalize and cement the several overlapping crises that rack the country. Obama’s vision for his monument could never have been fulfilled, because force and authority cannot serve the values he claims. As the legal historian John Langbein put it, “History’s most important lesson is that it has not been possible to make coercion compatible with truth.” Political power eventually shows itself for what it is, arbitrary violence and usurpation, so there is a sense in which these qualities had to express themselves in this structure. The truth has thwarted Obama again; he wants us to see this nightmare monument as a beacon of hope, but it reveals his legacy in spite of his wishes.
The story again is this disconnect, the disharmony between an emperor’s self-conception and the reality of what he has produced. Americans are confused about what the Obamas and Trumps of the world are there to do. But be assured that the Washington ruling class wages war on and occupies the lives of the domestic poor no less than it wages war on and occupies foreign countries. Their class does not care that you’re an American—you could be from Mars. Those who dominate and exploit are members of the same group, and their solidarity is as strong as their contempt for ordinary people. Their divide-and-rule strategy works because we perceive them as being engaged in a pro sports-style contest with each other, when they are in a permanent war against 99 percent of society. Will we wake up or get in line for a ticket to the Obamalisk? Our confusion about what our rulers are there to do is reflected in our reactions to their monuments to power and domination.
Someday, maybe, we will attain to an American leader who asks for a monument to genuine social transformation and regeneration, a monument of action in favor of the people whose work creates our society’s prosperity, but who remain penniless still. Until that monument is built, every political leader and billionaire “philanthropist” ought to be ridiculed relentlessly and mercilessly in public. And if that monument isn’t on the agenda or the visible horizon, we can’t very well blame the powerful for preferring to congratulate themselves and party with celebrities. We set Obama and Trump up as opposites, but maybe they are twins. We obsess daily about the sycophants in Trump’s orbit, but this phenomenon does not have a political party, an ideology, a native tongue, or a country. We see it in the celebrity spectacle around Barack Obama, who is himself a mere celebrity, only another cult of personality. These are people to fear, certainly, but they are not people to praise. Their monuments don’t belong to us no matter how many reassuring words they offer.
