What Will Obama Do Next After The Presidency? POTUS Could Take On Trump As A Community Organizer

The official end to President Barack Obama’s tenure is just under two weeks away, and while President-elect Donald Trump may be attracting most of the spotlight, many have their eyes on the outgoing commander-in-chief’s next move. As Politico and the Chicago Sun-Times recently reported, he’ll likely have his hands full with a variety of initiatives.

Obama has dropped hints here and there, jokingly telling the Hollywood Reporter that he’d like to host ESPN’s “SportsCenter,”and informing an audience at University of North Carolina A&T that he’s “going to sleep for two weeks” and then “take Michelle [Obama] on a really nice vacation.” A playful video displayed at the previous White House correspondents’ dinner suggested he might try coaching the Washington Wizards, getting a driver’s license, wear mom jeans and play more golf.

But as Obama’s close advisers told Politico in a report published Monday, he’ll likely focus on combatting some of the more aggressive policies of his successor. The effort, however, will be indirect and involve “lifting up the next generation of leaders,” as White House Communications Director Jen Psaki told the publication. Politico pointed to his former campaign group Organizing for Action as a soon-to-be “nexus for training activists and candidate recruitment” that lately “has been filling up with new hires.”

As one person familiar with the outgoing president’s plans told the magazine, Obama will certainly rise to the occasion if his legacy is threatened. The Chicago-based OFA, which has more than 250 local chapters nationwide, could prove a likely springboard.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Anita Breckenridge more or less confirmed these plans in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, when she told the paper that on top of OFA, Obama would likely be devoting resources to My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, an initiative stemming from his 2014 program, as well as the Obama Foundation, a library and museum located in Chicago’s Hyde Park, and, to a lesser degree, the Washington, D.C.-based National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which seeks to combat gerrymandering and is led by Obama’s first attorney general, Eric Holder.

The challenge for Breckenridge will be coordinating all of these political efforts from what she told the Sun-Times would be a tax-payer funded downtown Washington, D.C. office, where she’ll have $2 million in federal funds to put toward furniture, staffing, computers and the like.

“We are taking this enormous infrastructure, you know, that comes with being president and we are sort of rebuilding that,” Breckenridge told the paper. “Coming up with systems, how are we going to schedule him, how do we come up with a process to move him from point A to point B? What are going to be the priorities that we are focused on? I think that will take a good chunk of time, I would say, for the first four or five months.”

If one thing is certain, it’s that the Obamas will remain in the capitol for the duration of his younger daughter’s high school career.

“Transferring someone in the middle of high school—tough,” he told fellow patrons at a Milwaukee restaurant, according to the Chicago Tribune. Sasha Obama will graduate in 2019.