Just after Donald Trump was elected president, Barack Obama slumped in his chair in the Oval Office and addressed an aide standing near a conspicuously placed bowl of apples, emblem of a healthy-snacking policy soon to be swept aside, along with so much else."I am so done with all of this,"
Just after Donald Trump was elected president, Barack Obama slumped in his chair in the Oval Office and addressed an aide standing near a conspicuously placed bowl of apples, emblem of a healthy-snacking policy soon to be swept aside, along with so much else.
Which is not to say that Obama was not committed to his pre-Trump retirement vision — a placid life that was to consist of writing, sun-flecked fairways, policy work through his foundation, producing documentaries with Netflix and family time aplenty at a new $11.7 million spread on Martha’s Vineyard.
Story continuesHe is doing so carefully, characteristically intent on keeping his cool, his reputation, his political capital and his dreams of a cosseted retirement intact. On Thursday, during an invitation-only Zoom fundraiser, Obama expressed outrage at the president’s use of “kung flu” and “China virus” to describe the coronavirus. “I don’t want a country in which the president of the United States is actively trying to promote anti-Asian sentiment and thinks it’s funny. I don’t want that. That still shocks and pisses me off,” Obama said, according to a transcript of his remarks provided by a participant in the event.
But norms are not Trump’s thing. He made it clear from the start that he wanted to eradicate any trace of Obama’s presence from the West Wing. “He had the worst taste,” Trump told a visitor in early 2017, showing off his new curtains — which were not terribly different from Obama’s, in the view of other people who tramped in and out of the office during that chaotic period.
When the two men met for a stilted postelection sit-down in November 2016, the president-elect was polite, so Obama took the opportunity to advise him against going scorched-earth on Obamacare. “Look, you can take my name off of it; I don’t care,” he said, according to aides.As the transition dragged on, Obama became increasingly uneasy at what he saw as the breezy indifference of the new president and his inexperienced team.
During other conversations with editors he respected, including David Remnick of The New Yorker and Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, Obama was more ruminative, according to people familiar with the interactions. At times, he would float some version of this question: Was there anything he could have done to blunt the Trump backlash?
Obama was, then as now, so determined to avoid uttering the new president’s name that one aide jokingly suggested they refer to him as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” — Harry Potter’s archenemy, Lord Voldemort. “It did not start with Donald Trump — he is a symptom, not the cause,” he said in his kickoff speech at the University of Illinois in September 2018. The American political system, he added, was not “healthy” enough to form the “antibodies” to fight the contagion of “racial nationalism.”The virus, he said during his appearance with Biden last week, “is a metaphor” for so much else.
It was not especially easy for the former president to look on as his wife’s book, “Becoming,” was published in 2018 and quickly became an international blockbuster. But Obama did not finish and circulate a draft of between 600 and 800 pages until around New Year’s, too late to publish before the election, according to people familiar with the situation.
One of the first efforts was “Crip Camp,” an award-winning documentary about a summer camp in upstate New York, founded in the early 1970s, that became a focal point of the disability rights movement. Obama was supportive of Biden, personally, from the start of the campaign, but he promised Sen. Bernie Sanders, in one of their early chats, that his public profession of neutrality was genuine and that he was not working secretly to elect his friend, according to a party official familiar with the exchange.
He has never seen Biden’s campaign as a proxy war between himself and Trump, his aides insist. But he is, nonetheless, tickled by the lopsided metrics of their competition of late. Yet the rising cries for racial justice have lent the 2020 campaign a coherence for Obama, a politician most comfortable cloaking his criticism of an opponent — be it Hillary Clinton or Trump — in the language of movement politics.
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