Obama

I’m sure you don’t, but I’ll give you one anyway.

Michelle Obama has spent years selling herself as America’s warm, approachable former first lady. Remember the whole “when they go low, we go high” thing? We knew then it was just an empty slogan, because whenever she had a chance to prove she’s the bigger person, she just proved the opposite.

It looms over the poverty-stricken South Side of Chicago like a vast meteorite that has just plunged to Earth and embedded itself in the Windy City.

Comparisons have included a mausoleum, a ‘giant trash can’ and even the Death Star, the grim and deadly giant space station from the Star Wars films. And with a final cost of $850million, it has a price tag to match.

The granite-clad eyesore has sparked a furious row with locals who dismiss it as no more than a monument to a US President’s overweening ego and arrogance.

The statesman in question, however, isn’t – as might be expected – Donald Trump but Barack Obama, a politician not nearly so accustomed to such ugly accusations.

In 1921, Woodrow Wilson, the first of America’s four transformative progressive presidents, became the first president to remain in Washington and make the nation’s capital his permanent home after leaving office. In very mild defense of the man who did more than any other to establish the administrative state and thus pervert America’s carefully constructed constitutional design, Wilson had suffered a debilitating stroke two years prior that left him partially paralyzed and nearly blind. He died just a few years later, in 1924.