Barack Obama’s purported coolness is the stuff of legend—the easy jumpshots and tasteful Spotify playlists, that moment when he sang Al Green, and so on. It is hard to imagine that a sitting president would have time to keep up on NCAA basketball and Chance The Rapper mixtapes, which is probably because he did not have that time. These were coordinated productions with Obama at the center and with coolness as the aim, no less scripted than the Between Two Ferns appearance. We can still enjoy them even knowing this, because they showed us a president who cared about caring about culture, which is a marked contrast from our current president, who cares about TV ratings and it is hard to envision anything else.
Thus, while Obama takes his well-earned vacation but hopefully returns soon to join in with the massive nation-wide rebellion against the Trump administration, and also maybe to dunk on Steve Bannon, let us enjoy this one glimpse into his respite, because he is very much enjoying it.
He appears in the above picture to be actively turning his hat backwards, as if to say, “I am one and a half beers deep, and I am not doing shit today.” He is the only person wearing sunglasses. He is dressed head to toe in black sportswear. All of this serves as confirmation, again, of that truth we have known since the first time we saw Obama wearing blue jeans: that he is not actually cool. He is a remarkable man, but he is as cool as your uncle who knows computers. (And yes, that is eccentric billionaire Richard Branson to the left, because once you’re a certain amount of rich you just hang out with equally rich people and talk about Davos.)
It’s difficult to piece together the exact timeline of when Obama turned the hat backwards, but going by their order of appearance on Twitter, he soon took a seat with the crew and leaned way back.
Here they are going to the beach afterwards. This is a normal Obama wave, a wave performed many times as he sauntered into the rose garden or onto Air Force One, but with one crucial difference: He is doing it with his hat on backwards. He is probably two beers deep at this point.
There are no other photos of the backwards hat, but there were many jokes.
The whereabouts of Obama’s backwards hat are currently unknown, but he presumably tossed it onto a counter after two games of foosball with Richard Branson.