On Monday afternoon, with the Iran war entering its third month, Donald Trump spent his time on Truth Social posting memes, one casting Barack Obama as a traitor and another placing Jerome Powell in a dumpster.
The first post was a three-panel image contrasting Trump, Biden and Obama. Trump was shown raising his fist with the caption “LEADERS LEAD.” Biden was shown kneeling in a mask labeled “COWARDS KNEEL.” Obama was depicted bowing before Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with the label “TRAITORS BOW.”
The image referenced Trump’s decision to pull out of the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran, a decision Trump has been retroactively vindicating at every available opportunity. “If I didn’t terminate Obama’s horrible that he made, the Iran nuclear deal, you would have had a nuclear war four years ago,” Trump said last month. “You would have had nuclear holocaust.”
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Seven minutes later, the second post arrived. An AI-generated image showed Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell being dropped into an oversized dumpster.
Trump captioned it: “‘Too Late’ is a DISASTER for America! Interest Rates too high!” The nickname “Too Late” has been Trump’s preferred label for Powell for over a year, part of a personal insult catalog that also includes “moron,” “numbskull,” “major loser,” “very dumb,” “incompetent” and “stubborn moron.”
The Powell feud has moved beyond name-calling into legal territory.
The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve’s $4 billion building renovation last year, which Powell said was targeting him as a “consequence” for not cutting rates. The DOJ dropped the investigation last week, but US Attorney Jeanine Pirro said Sunday she would “not hesitate” to resume it.
Powell, for his part, announced he would remain on the Fed board as a governor after his chairmanship ends on May 15, a decision Trump greeted with the observation that Powell “can’t get a job anywhere else – Nobody wants him.”
The Obama meme captures a larger drift toward more confrontational content. In February, Trump posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, which stayed on his Truth Social account for approximately 12 hours before being deleted. The White House attributed it to a staffer error.
Obama has not publicly responded to Monday’s traitor meme. The nuclear holocaust Trump says he averted by exiting the Iran deal was not, by any documented account, actually imminent, a detail that has never slowed the claim down.
Featured image via Truth Social screengrab
