The long-awaited opening of the Obama Presidential Center and the former president’s increased public appearances and criticism by President Donald Trump merit a reflection on his legacy and an analysis of the role of his tenure in the rise of Trumpism.
Remembering former President Barack Obama‘s historic first campaign in 2008 and his charismatic ideas presents a stark commonality with Trump — of a famous and politically unconventional personality being brought in to service the demand for big reforms to the existing politics. Perhaps the contrast between these two men explains the promise of “total change” that allowed for the chaotic Trumpism.
Obama’s foreign dealings — from breaking ice with Cuba or lobbying the Paris Agreement, apologizing in Hiroshima or the Iran nuclear deal — despite his military actions, centered on amiability, multilateral action, and long-term goodwill. The Trumpian policy, on the other hand — from disruptive tariffs, inconsistent policy statements, berating Europe and Canada, exiting the World Health Organization and Paris Agreement, alienating or threatening allies, and the disastrous war in Iran — is to seek immediate benefit and influence via open-ended tactics that are marketed as long-term advantages.
OBAMA GAVE US A PAMPHLET. VANCE OFFERS A BELIEVER’S CONFESSION
As in the DREAM Act, DACA, the patchwork of climate change orders, or Obamacare, Obama took up long-term causes that needed long and extensive engagement with many stakeholders for support, while Trump decisively moves on long-demanded policies benefiting major lobbies or sections of election supporters — from tax cuts to abolishing the Department of Education, to tariffing countries to a slew of low-priority executive orders. Obama’s unprompted advice-seeking dialogues — from meeting top auto firms in the 2008 crisis or heeding military generals on Afghanistan — came at political and legislative cost, while Trump erratically insults, threatens, and battles those who don’t fall in line, from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to Federal Reserve governor Jerome Powell, no matter how senior.
That Obama took the moral burden of professing nationwide unity, describing life in the inner cities, and promoting principled arguments for policies, is contrasted with Trump’s image of the tactical elite moneymaker and reality TV star who feeds off controversy, is rooted in self-interest and promoting supporters’ views, and seeks support for the success of the personality rather than clear methods or principles.
By his own admissions, like in his autobiography, Obama stumbled before he adjusted to managing the media and personal life in the White House and was highly reliant, even occasionally appeasing, on his own advisers and lost easy political points by not making policies openly indifferent to the racial divide. Trump is used to the ivory tower of power and forever tests its limits, whether in presidential immunity or ending birthright citizenship.
So also is his disregard for tradition or protocol, from the UFC fight to demolishing the East Wing, forcing actions for appearance’s sake — like the Washington, D.C., cleanup and the discourtesy in interaction with world leaders — the opposite of the philosophical Obama who acknowledged and was slowed down by ground realities and decorum.
But it is the extremity of one personality type that was exploited to promote the opposite. Trump’s rise to power often seems to draw from the people’s disillusionment with the lack of change promised in the 2008 elections. As Obama later admitted, it was perhaps his own choice of substance over optics or expedience that projected stagnation and led to the Democrats’ electoral losses in the 2010 midterm elections and bolstered the bizarre tea party caucus that was a precursor to the Republican Party of Trump.
His pledge to take everyone together empowered Republicans who simply sought to disrupt. Beginning with his famous but unsuccessful visit to Capitol Hill to address Republican legislators on the Dodd-Frank Act, government closures, and McConnell’s declaration to ensure “Obama is a one-term president” to leaks by military generals, people saw the same partisanship they were fed up with.
The extremist views of Trump and the likes perhaps existed in some form in the ad hominem attacks of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and the like as far back as the 2008 campaign, but took root only in the early Obama years as an intense opposition to the failures of a celebrity politician.
In his meteoric rise to fame, Obama created America’s appetite for unconventional leaders and then lost it to the other side.
As Michael Kazin writes in a compilation of essays, The Presidency of Barack Obama, Obama’s continued initial reliance on his campaign instead of building the Democratic Party perhaps left more effect than his administration. It failed to address the demands of the organic coalition of mostly minority voters in 2008 and left behind a set of pre-Obama-era faces and extremist opponents.
Julian Zelizer’s volume also calls out Obama for political errors like alienating Democrat legislators — that forced a resort to executive actions like climate change and immigration before the 2012 elections — which were easily later undone.
Obama left himself a legacy of popular initiatives and personal acceptability but a more partisan culture, regretting himself that the “rancor and suspicion” between the parties had grown.
OBAMA SAYS TRUMP HAS AN ‘OBSESSION’ WITH HIM
But the failure to fix an issue is seen as the failure of the values that promised to fix it. Perhaps why overcrowding, inflation, differing school education values, police ineffectiveness, and media narratives have made the American voter double down on the search for all-out change. They have chosen strongheadedness and simple-speak over unity and nuanced policymaking.
Even so, Obama’s active post-presidency of criticism, work with his foundation, and artistic projects have tried to maintain his legacy in a chaotic Trumpian world. But it banks on him as a community organizer — which led him to fame and is now core to his mentorship work — and at the heart of the Chicago library and local cultural center, built by local workers. Long after, when the current chaos is done and dusted, it will probably still be the election night of 2008 that will define America’s story of the early 21st century.
Ved Mehta is an independent writer based in India.