Former President Barack Obama is out of office, thankfully, but it’s clear the man hasn’t changed very much. For all the hate focused on President Trump, he wasn’t the one who looked down on millions of Americans with absolute condescension, talking about how we were bitterly clinging to our guns and religion.

That would be the great orator, Obama.

Now would normally be the time when former presidents start trying to be a bit more magnanimous because they don’t have a base to appeal to anymore. They’d stop trying to alienate entire swaths of the public in order to appeal to others just a bit more than anyone else.

But not Obama.

The problem with the Republican Party, said former President Barack Obama, in The Atlantic, is “the attitudes of the base” — meaning, the conservatives who don’t live in and around the political bubbles of Washington, D.C., and who don’t travel in the liberal elitist circles of select spots in California and the East Coast.

In other words, Republicans who cave to Democrats — good. Conservatives who insist on the Constitution — problematic.

It’s Hillary Clinton’s baskets full of deplorables all over again.

Only this time, Obama completes the image of conservatives as stupid by explaining that it’s not so much the fault of the poor, ignorant people as it is the fault of the “right-wing media.”

As if conservatives are too stupid to think for themselves.

“I’ve said this before,” Obama told The Atlantic. “The problem facing the Republican Party, the conservative movement, whatever you want to call it, goes back to the attitudes of the base — attitudes that have been shaped by right-wing media. And so essentially what Republican elected officials have done is to say to themselves that in order to survive, we have to go along with conspiracy theorizing, false assertion, fantasies that Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh and others in that echo chamber have concocted, because people believe them.”

Of course, these “fantasies” typically include statements that Democrats are looking to take your guns. However, Obama fails to note just how often that pans out to actually be true.

Let’s not forget that Obama famously said that the only reason he wasn’t going to take our guns was that he knew he didn’t have the votes for it. That is what held him back. Not the Constitution or a respect for people’s rights. Nope, just a lack of support.

So he needs to forgive me if I actually don’t trust him with much of anything else.

Not that he will or that I’ll lose a moment’s worth of sleep over it. The truth is that while people often want to blame President Trump for the divisiveness we currently see, they really need to look no further than Obama. This is a man who has driven division through the skulls of the American public with his every waking breath.

And you want to talk about people’s base? Let’s not forget how Obama’s base had a field day calling anyone who criticized him “racist,” dismissing any and all arguments by taking a holier-than-thou stance and ignoring anything approaching debate.

Honestly, Obama didn’t learn anything from the last four years. To him and to most Democrats, it seems, we’ll always be bitter clingers.