Presidents’ Days: From Obama to Trump
In the fall of 2016, President Barack Obama and his aides at the White House made plans for one last trip abroad, on Air Force One, to deliver a message in Greece about the origins and the persistence of democratic values. The trip was planned in a mood of confidence, even advance celebration. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former Secretary of State and the Democratic nominee, would surely defeat Donald Trump, and Obama, who had won over an immense crowd in Berlin when he first ran for the White House, in 2008, would now have a valedictory moment near the Acropolis, where the ancient Greeks originated the business of self-rule. At least, that was the rosy view in the planning sessions.
The voters of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida, however (with an assist from James Comey and Clinton’s own stumbles), put an end to those plans. After Trump won the election, Obama agreed with aides who told him that to deliver the speech outdoors with the Acropolis as a backdrop would come off as grandiose and out of key with the moment. They moved the event to a more modest, less historically resonant venue—a cultural center in Athens. The content of the speech that Obama delivered was not greatly altered. But the context of the occasion had darkened considerably. In Athens, Obama spoke out in support of NATO and postwar alliances. He affirmed the ideals and the institutions of democratic rule: the separation of powers; an independent judiciary; freedom of speech and religion; a free press designed “to expose injustice and corruption”; free and fair elections; peaceful transitions of power. In the months and years that followed, Trump showed contempt for all of these. But, when Obama delivered the speech, few recognized the full extent of the emergency to come.
Recently, I’ve been revisiting that transitional moment—the passage from Obama to Trump—as I was provided early and exclusive access to a rich and fascinating oral-history project on the Obama Presidency conducted by Incite, a research institute at Columbia University. (The project, led by Columbia with contributions from the University of Chicago and the University of Hawaii, features hundreds of interviews with former Administration officials, advisers, activists, critics, artists, and ordinary people. It goes online on Tuesday, February 17th.)
One of the many interviews that caught my attention was with Terry Szuplat, a speechwriter who helped draft the Athens address. “He’s not trolling Trump,” Szuplat points out in an interview conducted over Zoom, during the pandemic. “What he’s doing, he’s laying down a marker of how democracies succeed, what’s required, what are the ingredients, the things that we’re going to have to defend in the coming years. He never once says Trump’s name.” The mood in the room in Athens was nonetheless sombre. Radical nationalism and populism were ascendant from Ankara to Moscow to Budapest. And now Trump was coming to power. “You could have heard a pin drop,” Szuplat said. “Those of us watching knew exactly what was going on and what we were listening to.”
Obama had started out, like so many, thinking that Trump was little more than a comical, if malevolent, real-estate hawker. Trump’s early and bellowing deployment of the racist “birther” theory gave Obama every reason to hate him; he chose, instead, to laugh at him. In January, 2016, Matt Lauer, then at NBC, asked Obama, “So, when you stand and deliver that State of the Union address, in no part of your mind and brain can you imagine Donald Trump standing up one day and delivering the State of the Union address?”
Obama laughed. “Well,” he said, “I can imagine it in a ‘Saturday Night’ skit.”
Even in the last days before the election, as the Clinton team faltered, Obama’s campaign guru David Plouffe still insisted that Clinton was a “one-hundred-per-cent” lock and instructed worrywarts to stop “wetting the bed.”
Like Plouffe, Obama proved to be a poor prognosticator. Not only did he (along with, in fairness, nearly everyone) fail to anticipate Trump’s victory, he failed to comprehend the degree to which Trump would, particularly in his second term, set out to demolish the principles and the institutions that Obama had defended in Athens. Obama met with Trump at the White House following the election, on November 10th. Not long afterward, Obama told me, in an interview in the Oval Office, “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.” In fact, he had told his staffers, who were stunned by Clinton’s loss, many of them weeping, that sometimes losing was the nature of democracy, that history does not move in straight lines.
“People were mired in despondency, and he thought part of his goal was to keep people pointed in the right direction,” David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser and political consultant, told me recently. “Our norms and institutions have proven more vulnerable to Trump’s assaults than President Obama imagined then.”
Obama told me at the time that he had accomplished “seventy or seventy-five per cent” of what he had set out to do, and that only fifteen or twenty per cent of what he had achieved would probably get “rolled back” by Trump. “But there’s still a lot of stuff that sticks.” This badly underestimated what was to come. Not only has Trump undermined government institutions and basic norms, he has, through his example, through his daily insults and his late-night social-media rants, normalized a level of racism, misogyny, and gratuitous division that cannot be calculated by percentages.
Here and there in the oral-history archive, people in the Obama circle refer to Trump’s racism, particularly the birther rhetoric that propelled his first campaign. Nearly a decade later, as I was watching and reading these interviews, the background noise was, as usual, incessant: there was Trump showering contempt on female reporters and sharing a racist video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. This is such routine behavior from Trump that, as news stories, they pass quickly and, of course, with no apology.
Out of office, the Obamas have handled these grotesque insults differently. Michelle Obama harbors deep anger at Trump, according to knowledgeable sources, and has made it plain that she wants nothing to do with him. She believed that the birther rhetoric endangered her family, and things only got worse from there. As a matter of obligation, Obama is still capable of sitting next to Trump, as he did at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, last year, and exchanging pleasant banalities. When I raised this with two of Obama’s closest aides, Axelrod and Ben Rhodes, they both referred to the analogous predicament of Jackie Robinson, who was the first Black player in modern major-league baseball, and who made it a matter of principle to endure and absorb every slur with an almost superhuman dignity. The pathfinder’s predicament. In private, Obama usually does not lash out angrily about the Trumpism of the day—that is not his temperament—but he will routinely ask people to imagine the response if he had been the one to, say, rage-post hateful videos at 2 A.M. or use his office to enrich his family by billions of dollars.
Often, Obama will ignore Trump’s daily offenses. When he finally reacted to the racist ape video, as he did on Brian Tyler Cohen’s podcast the other day, he did so with a formal, almost serene calm that stands outside the fevers of the political moment. “You know, it is true that it gets attention,” he began. “But you know, as I’m travelling around the country, as you’re travelling around the country, you meet people. They still believe in decency, courtesy, kindness. And there’s this sort of clown show that’s happening in social media and on television,” he went on. “And what is true is that there doesn’t seem to be any shame about this among people who used to feel like you had to have some decorum. And a sense of propriety and respect for the office, right? So that’s been lost.”
Obama’s posture toward Trump’s outrages is not a façade. As was the case with Robinson, his carriage is a matter of both discipline and principle. In a speech, Obama is perfectly capable of slamming Trump—many wonder why he does not do it far more often, considering the nature of the ongoing crisis—but he will not alter his nature.
“Look, by dint of biography, by dint of experience, the basic optimism that I articulate and present publicly as President is real,” he told me after his 2016 meeting with Trump. “It’s what I teach my daughters. It is how I interact with my friends and with strangers. I genuinely do not assume the worst, because I’ve seen the best so often. So, it is a mistake that I think people have sometimes made to think that I’m just constantly biting my tongue and there’s this sort of roiling anger underneath the calm Hawaiian exterior. I’m not that good of an actor. I was born to a white mother, raised by a white mom and grandparents who loved me deeply. I’ve had extraordinarily close relationships with friends that have lasted decades. I was elected twice by the majority of the American people. Every day, I interact with people of good will everywhere.”
In Athens, Obama made his speech at an ordinary hall, but still had occasion to visit the Acropolis. “There was something haunting about that,” Rhodes told me. “It was emptied of tourists for security reasons, and for Obama, given his kind of Buddhist nature, the persistence of this ancient place was a reminder of how temporary everything, like a particular leader, is. It was reassuring to him. Trump was elected, but democracy has been around for thousands of years. Obama actually thinks like that. So he took some solace in that.” ♦