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.
