Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of The Spectator. I'm joined today by Dave Vigal from the Washington Post, and we're going to be asking, does America really miss Barack Obama?

Dave, we've seen polls saying that the majority of Americans miss Obama and want him back, because they are so aghast at the Trump presidency.

How true do you think it is to say that Americans miss Obama?

Well, Obama hasn't given them much to miss yet.

He has studiously dropped out of the headlines,

I think similar to the way George Bush did, similar to more than Bill Clinton did, actually.

Bill Clinton, because his wife had just been elected, the Senate,

was pretty present in America in the first months of 2001.

But the difference this time is, actually, no, I shouldn't say the difference.

This is comparable to what happened with Bill Clinton in the way that Donald Trump has

flailed really since he won the election and has spent more time criticizing Obama than you

usually do when you take power. The comparison I'd say

is to Republicans attacked Bill Clinton for the pardons he signed at the end of his term in office

in 2001. There's been an effort to tie the former president to scandal or blame him, the best

example being blaming him for the monitoring of people in the Trump orbit ahead of the election because they were in touch with Russia.

Without getting into the weediness of all that, there has been an effort by not just the Trump administration, but Trump is synced up with conservative media in this country in a way that no president's

really been synced up with the media before. And you've got Fox News, you've got talk radio,

hammering Obama as if he's still a active threat to this president, as if it's still the campaign.

Meanwhile, Obama's pretty much absent. Yes. I mean, it does seem a odd. Trump seems to be

presenting, particularly on foreign policy we saw with the Syria strike himself as the anti-Obama.

He'll do what Obama was too much of a coward to do. Considering Obama's sort of relatively popular

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