On March 3, 2021, Barack Obama passed Franklin Roosevelt for the longest presidential tenure in American history.

What’s that you say? -- president, for longer than FDR? But FDR was elected president four times; Obama was elected president two times.

Yes, all of that is true. That’s why this record has an asterisk next to it.

For anyone with eyes to see, the current presidency is being run by Barack Obama. 

Even before this presidency began, its roots were laid in Obama’s home in Washington. Over the past couple of years, Obama-House was the royal court for receiving, selecting, and anointing the party’s standard-bearer for 2020. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris were Obama’s favored candidates, and Obama-House functioned as the campaign war-room. But Harris gained no traction, and dropped out of the race on December 3, 2019, exactly two months before the Iowa caucuses. 

That left Warren -- to face off against Bernie Sanders in the left-wing bracket of the sweepstakes. The party had already determined, four years earlier, that Sanders was unsuitable as its standard-bearer because he wielded an abrasive, in-your-face style of Marxism. Obama himself expressed such sentiments more than once. So, the party scuppered his campaign in 2016. But in 2020, Sanders was bettering Warren in the early primaries.

So, the Obama camp had to go to plan B — find somebody who was “presentable” to the public. 

In the first two contests of the nominating process, Joe Biden fared very badly -- maybe even worse than Harris would have done had she stayed in. He finished a distant fourth in Iowa and a much-weaker fifth in New Hampshire. He was bumbling along on stage and on the hustings and going nowhere fast. And Obama didn’t even like Biden, but Biden would have to do -- there weren’t really many other options on hand.

So, all the other candidates immediately dropped out; the Black vote in South Carolina and across the South was delivered to Biden; and he was anointed the nominee. 

We know the rest of the story -- Biden was banished to the basement; the media carried the water for him and continued demonizing Trump; Big Swamp exploited and manipulated a virus; and Big Cities stopped counting the votes late on election night, to figure out how many “votes” they needed to get their man over the finish line.

Which leads us to the inauguration of Joe Biden as president. On his first day in the White House, Biden expelled the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office, as Obama had done on his first day in office (because Churchill was an imperialist and led the suppression of the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, during which, Obama said, his grandfather was tortured; Trump brought the Churchill bust back on his first day in office).

Then there are Biden’s appointments -- they say that personnel is policy. Well, the old Obama gang is back, and at the center of the action is Susan Rice. A foreign-policy specialist (ambassador to the United Nations and then-National Security Adviser under Obama), Rice was one of Biden’s first appointments -- as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. That’s her official title, but her actual job is to be Obama’s “messenger boy” in the White House and to cover any remaining tracks to past criminal activities.

Heading the White House press room is Jen Psaki; she was Obama’s communications director. Anthony Blinken moves up a notch: from being Obama’s deputy secretary of state to the top job at Foggy Bottom. Obama’s chairman of the federal reserve, Janet Yellen, is now secretary of the Treasury.

Anita Dunn, who had to resign from her top post in Obama’s Department of Education because she’d praised Chairman Mao, is back. Merrick Garland, whom Obama was unable to get into the Supreme Court in 2016, gets the consolation prize of Attorney General -- a “take-that” from Obama. Those are the most glaring of a slew of Obama retreads. It wouldn’t be surprising if Van Jones and Samantha Power get appointments soon, and David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Rahm Emanuel, and other members of the Chicago mafia are major behind-the-scenes players.

Then there are the rewards to the people who tried to sabotage the Trump campaign in 2016 and who took part in the “resistance” to his presidency. Peter Strzok, his wife, and all others who made “sacrifices” in the effort are being compensated for their pain and suffering.

On the policy front, the White House has rapidly undone almost all of Trump’s reversals of Obama policies, while ratcheting up the Obama agenda with even more-radical steps than Obama took in his first eight years of “fundamentally transforming” the country. The border is open again. The Keystone Pipeline is canceled. Coal mining and energy independence are “out.” Subsidies to “green energy” and Big Tech are back. So is Big Pork and the great party slush fund.

China is no longer an enemy. Climate change is an existential threat again, and the Paris Accords take center-stage. The Iran nuclear deal is back on -- actually, John Kerry never stopped negotiating with Iran. And to curry favor with Iran, the administration is lifting sanctions against the country and has halted the sale of weapons to those of Iran’s Arab enemies that recently made peace with Israel. As for Israel, the White House is stiffing the country, big time -- especially as it has the wrong leaders.

Okay -- so that makes three terms for Obama, but FDR was elected president four times.

To complete the set, we have to rewind the tape to 2016. Obama was finishing his second term and handing off leadership of the Marxist revolution to Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side, three candidates for president -- Trump, Cruz, and Carson -- were vehemently opposed to Obama, his policies, and the direction of the country. So Obama spied on their campaigns. Trump still won. 

But not only did Trump trump the Swamp, he then actually tried to put the brakes on the Marxist revolution. He took steps to reverse the regulatory state and he allowed the economy to boom. But worst of all, Trump bruised the Swamp’s ego -- he exposed it as arrogant, corrupt, and incompetent, and as the entrenched D.C. front of the Marxist revolution.

After he arrived in Washington, Trump quickly learned that Obama was running the “resistance” to his presidency -- the government’s opposition from within (in the summer of ‘16, Trump had informed the world that his campaign was being spied on). 

During Trump’s four years in Washington, Obama ran the shadow government out of his DC home, probably exerting more influence over the wheels of government than the man in the Oval Office did. Obama lined up whistleblowers, leaks to the press, and resistance to the president from within the government, including in the White House and the president’s cabinet. He advised “the gang of four” and other radicals on policy and presentation. 

The ultimate goal of the efforts was to impede and hobble the duly elected president, to subvert, sabotage, and undermine his agenda, and to ultimately expel him from office -- by any means necessary -- in the bowels of government, in the media and entertainment, in academia and education, in Big Tech, Big Finance, and Big Business. 

So, we ought to face reality -- as of today, Obama has been running the show in Washington for 4,424 days -- and counting -- and he’s not shy about letting us know it.

Ayad Rahim, a former journalist, is a bookseller and tutor in the Midwest.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

[This is a slightly revised version of the original post, updated to correct some stylistic errors.]