The NY Times does a Peter Baker piece that uses historical interviews to look back at how Barack Obama as President and his people looked the NYC Real Estate and Entertainer Donald Trump climbed into spotlight to their surprise …
But it also looks critically at the Obama years..
A history making President that walked into office with a Deep Recession dropped in his lap, who went on to get historic legislation for healthcare, Rights for Americans and brought home troops from Iraq….
But also planted the seeds of todays Ukraine situation…
Also?
There ARE some of us who think that a good part of Donald J. Trump push HAS been to prove himself AGAINST the aura of following America’s First Black/Mixed Race President….
Trump IS STILL throwing at guy he followed into office….
The guy who made him fun of him while he sat at a Correspondent’s dinner in front a hundred people and camera’s….
As President Barack Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, made his way across a hotel ballroom on the night of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2011, he happened to overhear Donald J. Trump boasting to other guests. “I know it’s crazy,” Mr. Trump was saying, “but I’m in front of the polls.”
“I kind of chuckled at it and went to my seat,” Mr. Axelrod recalled. “I don’t think any of us really anticipated that Donald Trump would be a serious candidate for president, much less president.” It was later that same evening that Mr. Obama would mock Mr. Trump from the stage, ridiculing the reality television star in a moment that would go viral.
In fact, Mr. Obama and his team never saw Mr. Trump coming, as a new set of oral history interviews released on Tuesday makes abundantly clear. He was, to them, a “con man,” a “clown,” a “laughingstock.” He was a thorn in the side with his birther lies and demagogic bloviating. But as it turned out, Mr. Obama and his advisers, like many others, missed the shifting mood of the country that would ultimately upend Mr. Axelrod’s assumptions.
The oral history, compiled by Incite Institute, a social science research center at Columbia University, represents the most extensive set of interviews made public to date from the Obama presidency. The institute, in cooperation with the Obama Foundation, conducted more than 450 interviews totaling more than 1,100 hours of audio and video with cabinet secretaries, White House aides, family members, opposition leaders and outside figures affected by administration policies.
Two limited tranches of the oral history interviews were released previously, but the institute posted the full set online on Tuesday morning for the perusal of historians, researchers and the merely curious. The interviews do not include Mr. Obama himself or his wife, Michelle Obama, or vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., but do include major figures like Hillary Clinton, John F. Kerry, Robert M. Gates, Paul D. Ryan, Oprah Winfrey and even the former president’s mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, who died in 2024.
The interviews tell the back story of a presidency that pulled the country out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, rescued the auto industry, passed landmark legislation on health care, gay rights and financial regulation, brought home most troops from Iraq and hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden. They also explore the failure to stop the Russian annexation of Crimea, the slaughter in Syria, the collapse of Libya and the rise of the Islamic State.
But nine years after he left office with high approval ratings and one year into Mr. Trump’s second term, what remains striking is how inconceivable it seemed to Mr. Obama and his team that populist disenchantment with the establishment, globalization and demographic changes would elevate a figure they scorned. It was a question that hovered over the interviews as they struggled for answers.
“The outcome of the election was a direct rebuke of everything that we had been trying to do for the last 10 years,” reflected Josh Earnest, who was Mr. Obama’s last White House press secretary.
“Trump’s candidacy,” he added, “the essence of his being and everything that he stood for and everything about the way that he carried himself and everything that he championed and his rhetoric, his campaign tactics — all were anathema to everything that the Obama campaign and the Obama era, the Obama administration, had been about.”…
image….Variety
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