Why Does Trump Hate Lyndon B. Johnson? Because LBJ Did What Trump Never Will—Change the Country for the Better

Opinion by: Aisha K. Staggers, Editor-At-Large

Donald Trump’s list of presidential enemies is long. But his hatred is sharpest for two men: Barack Obama and Lyndon B. Johnson.

With Obama, the racism is obvious—Trump launched his political career by trying to delegitimize the nation’s first Black president. But it goes beyond race. Trump loathes that rather than fall on his face, as many expected the first Black president to do, Barack Obama rose to the moment and passed the most significant piece of healthcare legislation in a generation. 

The Affordable Care Act wasn’t just a policy win—it was a seismic political achievement that Democrats had spent more than 30 years chasing. Obama succeeded where Bill Clinton failed. Where Ted Kennedy ran out of time. That victory sealed his legacy in permanent ink. And Trump has been obsessed with erasing it ever since—not because it didn’t work, but because it did. Because it proved that a Black man could outmaneuver Congress, outlast the pundits, and outshine his enemies by doing what Trump never could: govern with skill, empathy, and impact.

Trump wants to be remembered as the most transformative president of the modern era. He wants monuments, not indictments. He wants legislation that reshapes American life, not rollbacks stamped with cruelty. He wants to be the kind of president whose impact echoes across generations. And he knows he’s not. So instead of building, he destroys.

And LBJ? LBJ built.

Say what you will about Lyndon Baines Johnson—and there's plenty to say. He was a Southern power broker who used the n-word in the Oval Office, belittled staffers, escalated the Vietnam War, and bulldozed political opposition like it was a personal sport. But when the moment demanded moral courage, Johnson grabbed the full machinery of government and used it to advance civil rights, voting rights, fair housing, education, and health care. The Great Society wasn’t perfect, but it fundamentally altered who had access to power and possibility in America.

Trump can’t compete with that. So he’s dismantling it instead.

Every signature program Johnson championed, Trump has targeted: Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, public broadcasting, the Higher Education Act, immigration reform, and federal funding for marginalized communities. Trump isn’t just undoing policies—he’s trying to erase Johnson’s name from history by tearing down every beam of the house LBJ helped build.

And yet the irony is this: Trump doesn’t just hate Johnson. He wants to be Johnson—just with fascism instead of fairness.

He wants the scale of Johnson’s legacy, the gravity of his decisions, the “I changed America” headline burned into textbooks. But Trump’s only roadmap to history is spite. He has no grand vision—only vendettas. Where Johnson signed laws to expand democracy, Trump weaponizes power to punish his enemies. Where Johnson confronted the moral failure of racism—even if begrudgingly—Trump stokes it as a political strategy. And where Johnson sought to unite poor Americans across racial lines, Trump divides them for sport.

It’s no accident that Trump’s favorite presidents are those who reinforced white power—Andrew Jackson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Johnson, for all his flaws, ruptured that tradition. He knew signing the Civil Rights Act would “lose the South for a generation”—and he did it anyway. Trump, on the other hand, courts that South like it’s the Confederacy reincarnated.

So yes, Trump hates LBJ. But it’s deeper than ideology.

He hates that LBJ did the one thing Trump never could: sacrifice popularity for progress. He hates that Johnson’s name is etched into some of the most transformative legislation of the 20th century—while Trump’s most memorable act may be inciting a deadly insurrection because he lost.

Most of all, he hates that when historians write about who truly changed the course of America, Johnson and Obama will get chapters—and Trump will get footnotes.

Or maybe one of those advisory stickers, “LEARN WITH EXTREME CAUTION.”

Either way, it won’t be the legacy he craved. So he lashes out at the men who earned theirs the hard way: with vision, with courage, and with consequences.

That’s something Trump will never understand—because hate builds nothing. And history remembers that.