Never one for modesty, Obama also--as David Samuels observed in Tablet last August
--made sure to drop O.J. Simpson If I Did It-style hints about how a "hypothetical" surrogate presidency might work:"That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office. "I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony," he told Steven Colbert in 2015, "I'd be fine with that because I found the work fascinating." Even with all these clues, the Washington press corps--fresh off their years of broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin--seemed unable to imagine, let alone report on, Obama's role in government."