“Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism is not abstract,” writes Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication from 2009-2017 in a March 2 editorial in The New York Times. Rhodes continues:

There is nothing stopping him from wielding the awesome power of the United States to serve his own interests, not the public’s. War should never be normal. We don’t know where this one will lead, but we do know that it has already killed untold civilians—including dozens of girls who did nothing but go to school. The desensitization of Americans to this kind of violence is part of what is broken in our society.

Before crediting his opinion too highly, however, there’s more about Rhodes people should know.

Born in New York in 1977, Rhodes earned a BA in English and political science from Rice University and a masters in “creative writing” from NYU. He was profiled in the May 5, 2016 New York Times, by David Samuels as “The Aspiring Novelist who became Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru.” Samuels explains, “Ben Rhodes’ life is still unique, and perhaps not strictly believable, even as fiction.”

Rhodes joined the Obama campaign in 2007, billed as an expert on Iraq. Hs wife Ann Norris works in the State Department and his older brother, David, served as president of CBS News from 2011-2019. The aspiring novelist became “the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from POTUS himself” and Rhodes “strategized and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign.”

In Rhodes’ narrative, the deal began in 2013 with a “moderate” faction led by Hassan Rouhani. In reality, it started in 2012, long before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That deception was an easy sell.

“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” quipped the creative writer. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” So as Samuels notes, Rhodes proved adept at “ventriloquizing” reporters and could “shape the news” from the briefing podium, with help from “force multipliers” he didn’t name.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was formally announced in July 2015. The next year, this writer’s Barack ’em Up: A Literary Investigation revealed that Obama’s supposed autobiography, Dreams from My Father, was more properly called a roman à clef, a novel. In May, 2017 that was confirmed by Pulitzer Prize winner David Garrow in his massive Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama:

Dreams from My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography, it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.

A reporter told Garrow it was all cooked up by the composite character and “Obama’s Narrator” David Axelrod, who in Believer (2015) describes himself as a storyteller. Jump ahead to 2018, and the publication of Rhodes’ The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House.

“I wanted to work for Barack Obama,” explained Rhodes, who reported to David Axelrod, “a brilliant strategist who weighed in on every issue.” Dreams from My Father, “is a kind of Rosetta Stone to Obama’s life and world view,” and Rhodes claims he reread it “a dozen times.” He makes no reference to Garrow’s revelation.

Rhodes claims he is “proud of what I’d done over the last year, with the Cuba opening and the Iran deal.” The Samuels article comes up and Rhodes talks about creating an “echo chamber,” with reporters “saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

The creative writer describes Obama as “symbol for the aspirations of billions of people.” In July 2018, Obama called The World As It Is, “one of the smartest reflections I’ve seen as to how we approached foreign policy, and one of the most compelling stories I’ve seen about what it’s actually like to serve the American people for eight years in the White House.”

Obama’s book A Promised Land, released in 2020, contains only a single mention of Dreams from My Father, whose black poet “Frank” is the Communist Frank Marshall Davis. Frank disappeared from the audio version of Dreams and from all subsequent books by the composite character and his wife. Davis’s “Communist background plus his kinky exploits (Davis was also a pornographer) made him politically radioactive,” explained Garrow in Rising Star. So the Dreams author, born in 1961, needed the “historical fiction” about the Kenyan foreign student who allegedly “bequeathed his name” to the American.

Trouble is, in all his writings from 1958-1964, now housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, the Kenyan Barack Obama makes no mention of an American wife and son. So no surprise that the former president never read the material. 

Jump ahead to “The Obama Factor,” in August 2023, in which Tablet’s David Samuels interviews David Garrow. In his view Obama is “not a normal politician or a normal human being” and “for me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction—oh God, did that infuriate him.” Samuels found the deception deeply troubling.

“There was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now,” the Tablet editor said. Garrow finds the Iran deal “offensive and puzzling,” and notes Joe Biden’s “continuing attachment to the Iran deal.”

“The easy explanation, of course is that Joe Biden is not running that part of his administration. Obama is. He doesn’t even have to pick up the phone because all of his people are already inside,” Samuels writes. He cites, among others, “Lisa Monaco in Justice. Susan Rice running domestic policy. It’s turtles all the way down. There are obviously large parts of White House policymaking that belong to Barack Obama, because they are staffed by his people, who worked for him and no doubt report back to him.”

This was happening “outside the constitutional framework of the U.S. government, and yet somehow it’s been placed off the list of permitted subjects to report on” and “if you question it you are some kind of nut.” This realization came from the man who, in 2016, authored the puff piece on Ben Rhodes, the “aspiring novelist” with the degree in creative writing. Rhodes sold the Iran deal to reporters who also failed to see that Dreams from My Father was a novel and the author, as Samuels put it, a “fictitious character” who helped precipitate “the disaster that we are living through now.”

The Iran deal is literally up in smoke and creative writer Ben Rhodes thinks Trump may come to regret it. If the deal had succeeded, and Iran developed a nuclear weapon, untold civilians in many countries might already be dead. There’s no telling what can happen when a fictitious character serves three terms and reporters who “literally know nothing” believe his story.