Former US president Barack Obama has mocked Donald Trump for being “obsessed” with him in a rare, though not unprecedented, public potshot at his successor.Speaking to the podcast All The Smoke, which usually focuses on sport rather than politics, Mr Obama also implied Mr Trump is two-faced, saying the current President “never” dares to repeat his harsh public remarks about the Obamas when they’re face-to-face.American presidents almost never criticise each other in public – their shared experience of the job’s stresses tends to create a mutual respect across party lines.Indeed, all the living presidents at the moment, apart from Mr Trump, are friends, as are their spouses. Bill Clinton, Mr Obama, and Joe Biden are all Democrats, while George W. Bush is a Republican.The four of them and their wives were together last week, in Chicago, to celebrate the opening of Mr Obama’s presidential library. Mr Trump was not invited.Anyway the typical presidential cone of silence has never really applied with Mr Trump, particularly when it comes to Mr Obama, who campaigned against him in often harsh terms during the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections.To be fair, Mr Trump has also been relentlessly critical of Mr Obama, both as the sitting president and during the period from 2021 to 2025 when he was out of office.So the antipathy between them is mutual.All The Smoke is hosted by former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. It was a friendly interview with Mr Obama, and while they mostly avoided politics, both men made it pretty clear where they stood in the Obama-Trump feud.“The leader of this current administration is still very fascinated with you and your family, constantly bringing you guys up. And you’ve been out of office nearly ten years now,” Mr Barnes said.“How do you continue to keep your cool and take the high road, so to speak? Because we asked Michelle, and Michelle said we don’t have to take the high road no more.“But you constantly seem to meet the negativity and the racism with class, and it makes you stand out so high. But you don’t want to cuss his ass out sometimes?”“I mean, the thing about it is, look, you’ve got to ask him what it is that-” Mr Obama started to say, pausing briefly as he searched for the right word.“The obsession?” Mr Barnes suggested.“The obsession,” Mr Obama agreed.“I obviously, you know, have a room in his head. A suite in his head.”“Rent-free,” said Mr Barnes.“But the thing about it is, it was always clear to me – first of all, when I was president, the last thing I had time to do was worry about what somebody said, or what my predecessor did. They’re gone! I’ve got work to do!” said Mr Obama.“It’s hard to describe. If you’re doing the job right, every day, you’ve got five or ten things that are real hard. And you have to be constantly focused.“The idea that I’d be worrying about somebody who came before, and me trying to measure, ‘What’s he done today?’ Constantly worrying about that. Is a strange thing to me. It shows me somebody who’s not focused on the American people and the job they’re supposed to do.”Mr Obama went on to offer a thinly veiled critique of Mr Trump’s media habits, particularly his use of social media.“The other thing that I learned pretty early in this gig was you have to screen out the noise, in order for you to understand what’s in front of you and deal with it well,” he said.“My whole presidency, I never watched cable TV. I never watched cable news. Never read – I never had social media.“There were people on my staff whose job it was to monitor what folks were saying, because you want to have input when you’re getting constructive criticism. The flipside is that you do not get puffed up when things are going good.“I screened that stuff out pretty early on.”Mr Trump, it is fair to say, does not “screen that stuff out”. He’s an avid watcher of cable news shows, and is often up in the middle of the night posting on social media.In one last jab, the former president implied Mr Trump had never mustered the courage to call him out in person, despite his frequent criticism from afar.“I believe in face-to-face. I believe in conversation,” said Mr Obama.“So if this, whoever you were talking about, was in front of me,” he added with a grin, “which has happened a couple of times. He don’t talk like that. Because he knows better, and I think there is a – that filter of a phone creates a situation where both people just say kind of crazy stuff that they would never say to your face.”At no point did he actually name Mr Trump, but his meaning was clear.The bad blood between them goes back further than Mr Trump’s entry into politics in 2015. Before that, during Mr Obama’s first term as president, Mr Trump – then a reality TV star and real estate guy – was America’s foremost pusher of the “birther” conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed the country’s first black president had been born overseas, making him ineligible for the job.Famously, at the 2011 White House Correpondents’ Dinner, with Mr Trump sitting in the audience (and visibly fuming), Mr Obama told several quite brutal jokes at his expense.“I know he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than Donald,” he said.“And that’s because he can get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like: did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”Mr Trump was so incensed by the roasting that it reportedly served as a key motivation for his own presidential run – which, to Mr Obama’s horror, proved successful.