Does Barack Obama know something we don’t? While much of the world has eyes wide in horror at his successor, the man who was until recently president of the United States looks like he hasn’t a care in the world. If he is worried about Donald Trump dismantling his legacy, reversing his values and setting history alight, he has certainly forgotten those cares for sea, sun and mirrored shades as he radiates a happiness bordering on ecstasy in this holiday photograph.

While staying with Richard Branson recently in the British Virgin Islands, Obama learned to kitesurf, and the thrill of rediscovering his beloved watersports after eight years when he was kept out of the waves for security reasons glows in his face and relaxed body language. Yet for anyone who has woken up in the early hours worried and scared by Trump, this gleeful display of sheer satisfaction with life may seem a bit rich. Good vibrations are all very well but what about the future of the world?

Yet everything we know about Obama suggests he is far too good a person to simply surf while America burns

It seems unlikely that Obama has completely forgotten all sense of responsibility and opted for a life of lotus-eating hedonism while the planet goes to hell. So why does he look so happy?

He has a lot to be happy about. Not only did he complete eight years in office that already look like a golden age of decency and common sense, but he also seemingly has a genuinely loving and contented marriage and family life, and a rich, cultivated personality – he can write, and had said he plans to do that. Plus, there’s the kitesurfing.

Obama and Branson kitesurfing trip branded huge publicity stunt Read more

It would also be forgivable if, having endured some savage criticism from the left while in office, he is relishing the nostalgia that even the most carping liberal must surely feel for him now. Unless of course Branson’s opportunistic release of these images provokes attacks from said carping liberals on Obama’s cosiness with the world of wealth.

Yet everything we know about Obama suggests he is far too good a person – after all, even former birther consiracy theorist Trump called him “a very good man” and now cherishes his friendship – to simply surf while America seems to be turning into a bad parody of The Man in the High Castle. So what gives? Why does Obama look so astonishingly happy while many of us are gazing into the far right abyss?

I suspect this happiness has to do with the quality that Obama has always championed. This is a picture not of selfish joy, but hope.

Well that is reassuring, especially since he really does know something most of us don’t – he knows Trump. They have met and, perhaps, Obama believes he has got the measure of his successor. Maybe he thinks there is less to worry about than many of us fear.

Why might that be? It can hardly be that he thinks Trump is a moderate under his orange skin. Nor can he seriously believe the falsely reassuring Washington mantra that his voters taking him seriously but not literally, while the establishment took him literally but not seriously. Guess what – from building the wall to banning many Muslims from entering the US, Trump is pursuing his bigoted promises with a crushing literalness, and adding a sinister campaign against the press and media in case anyone mistakes him for a normal democratic politician.

If Obama has been doing any beach reading between watersport exploits, he may even have dipped into some 20th-century history and recognised the frightening parallels between the acts, statements and style of this hypernationalist administration in its first few weeks, and the rhetoric and ideologies of European dictators in the 1920s and 1930s. All that talk of “populism” looks like pussyfooting around now that Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon is stoking up apparently intentional mayhem.

Whether or not the current stay on Trump’s US entry ban stands, this early confrontation with the checks and balances built into the US constitution reveals a basic ignorance and superficiality in his attempt to impose a “strong man” rule on America. The founding fathers put these checks and balances in place to prevent the rise of a tyrant. Resisting tyranny was the central premise of the republican (with a small r) tradition of political theory on which the 18th-century American revolution rests.

In our horror, we are missing the point that perhaps Obama has grasped. The Trump “movement” – as Trump likes to call it – died on inauguration day. That row about the numbers of people in Washington’s National Mall? It mattered. For without a mass movement that makes itself physically – and dangerously – felt on the streets, there can be no future for Mussolini-style bluster.

Trump has a stay-at-home electorate of reality tv fans. It is the left who are on the streets. It is his enemies who have the youth, anger and numbers.

Obama is smiling because he knows this is going to be the most ineffectual dictatorship ever – and soon we won’t be worrying about Trump. We will be deriding his incompetence.

Then we can all go surfing.