Obamas Appear To Be Planning Trump-Bashing New Netflix Show
Speculation is swirling around the projects Barack and Michelle Obama will pursue as part of their deal with Netflix to produce programming for the platform.
Netflix announced its partnership with the former president and first lady in a tweet earlier this year.
“President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have entered into a multi-year agreement to produce films and series for Netflix, potentially including scripted series, unscripted series, docu-series, documentaries, and features,” the streaming network announced.
President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have entered into a multi-year agreement to produce films and series for Netflix, potentially including scripted series, unscripted series, docu-series, documentaries, and features.
— Netflix US (@netflix) May 21, 2018
According to The Week, the first such project might include an adaptation of the Michael Lewis book “The Fifth Risk.”
The indicators stem from a report Wednesday by Deadline, which revealed the Obamas had obtained the rights to the book documenting the transition of power between the Obama and Trump administrations.
Specifically, Lewis describes a disorganized launch of the fledgling Departments of Agriculture, Energy and Commerce in the early days of Trump’s first term.
In a recent podcast interview with Katie Couric, the author called his book the equivalent of a “civics lesson” in its approach to the incoming Trump administration.
“I did three departments, because it would be the work of many lifetimes to do the whole government, but you could do this in a fun way across the entire government,” he said.
As The Week’s Brendan Morrow noted, an article in The New York Times shortly after Netflix’s announcement in May revealed that the former president promised he would not use his influence as a producer to “wage a public campaign against his successor.”
Morrow surmised that this means “either The Fifth Risk won’t be as much of a takedown of President Trump as one might initially think, or Obama has changed his mind and decided that a public campaign against Trump might not be such a bad idea after all.”
The former president has been a fixture on the campaign trail ahead of next week’s midterm elections.
As CNN reported, Obama appeared to reference Trump during a rally in Florida when he described politicians who “just blatantly, repeatedly, baldly, shamelessly” lie.
“When words don’t mean anything, when truth doesn’t matter, when people can just lie with abandon, democracy can’t work,” he told a crowd in Miami this week.
He went on to allude to Trump’s recent assertion that he has the authority to reverse the constitutional precedent of birthright citizenship through an executive order.
Obama told the crowd that “a president doesn’t get to decide on his own who’s an American citizen and who’s not.”
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