Trump's Illicit Threat to Jail Obama Is Meant to Rally His Supporters Around Bogus Prosecutions of Political Opponents

Jul 20, 2025

Having claimed absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for himself, Donald Trump is now openly fantasizing about arresting and jailing former President Barack Obama for his actions in office, posting fake AI-generated video of Obama being handcuffed and pacing in a cell.

Time has an overview:

The current President shared on his Truth Social platform on Sunday a video from TikTok user @neo8171 that starts with a montage of Democratic politicians, including Obama, saying, “No one is above the law,” to the tune of Luciano Michelini’s “Frolic” (made famous as the theme song of sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm”). After about 40 seconds, the soundtrack changes to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.,” as apparently AI-generated video depicts Trump and Obama sitting in the Oval Office and FBI officers handcuffing Obama while Trump smiles and laughs. It ends with an AI-generated depiction of Obama pacing around a jail cell.
Trump also shared an AI-generated image attributed to X user @sirtemplemount that showed fake mugshots of Obama and officials from his Administration with the words “The Shady Bunch.”

The occasion for this is a heavily politicized report from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard targeting, not foreign enemies, but domestic ones, using out-of-context passages to make false claims that Obama officials falsified information about Russian election interference. Yet, as the Time article notes, that information has been repeatedly validated.

Rep. Jim Himes … referred to a Republican-led Senate report in 2020 that agreed with the 2017 findings of Russian influence. That report was backed by now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio and found “no evidence” of collusion between Trump and the Russian government in the 2016 election but did find “irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.” There have been several other reviews since 2017 that also backed the assessment.

Trump’s fantasy of jailing Obama is very unlikely to happen. It is more likely Trump will initiate bogus, politically motivated prosecutions of Obama administration officials. Those cases will fail in the courts, but their purpose is to harass Trump’s political opponents—and eventually to prepare his supporters to support arbitrary arrests of their hated political enemies.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.