“I’m trying to place him in American history,” Obama told a few of his aides after the meeting, according toThe World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, out Tuesday.
Rhodes writes that during Obama’s meeting with Trump, the president-elect repeatedly brought up his rally sizes. Trump also seemed open to “Obama’s arguments about healthcare, the Iran deal, immigration.”
The new president was polite, but, as Obama explained it to Rhodes, Trump had “almost taken pride in not being attached to a firm position on anything.”
Rhodes has a theory about this, and shared it with President Obama.
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“[Trump] peddles bulls—. That character has always been a part of the American Story,” Rhodes remembers telling Obama. “You can see it right back to some of the characters inHuckleberry Finn.”
Obama laughed, “Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.”
While Obama tried to remain optimistic for his staff, days after the election he started to express his “disbelief” that Trump won, according to the book.
The former president started “trying on different theories,” and centered on the fact that there had been “multiple car crashes at once” before the election, Rhodes writes. Fromthen-FBI director James Comey’sdecision to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server, to the “rabid right-wing propaganda machine” that aided Trump’s depiction of “Corrupt Hillary,” many factors were against the democratic nominee.
“[Comey’s announcement] stopped my momentum,” Hillary Clinton said in an interview last year onTodaywhile discussing her post-election memoir and the factors that led to her loss, which she saidincluded Comey and rampant sexism. “It drove voters from me — understandably. This is not about the voters who were saying, ‘Well wait, what does this mean and how do I evaluate it?’ So I think in terms of my personal defeat, that was the most important factor.”
But, during Obama’s chat with his aides, Rhodes reveals Obama also made a subtle dig at his successor.
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“To win, [Obama] told us, you have to have a core reason why you’re running, and you need to make it clear to everyone how much you want to win,” Rhodes writes. “‘You have to want it,’ he said, like Michael Jordan demanding the ball the final moments of a game.”
Hillary Clinton was routinely criticized during and after the 2016 presidential campaign fornot clearly articulating her reason for runningfor president. Despite the multiple factors that led to her loss, the result was catastrophic for both Clinton and Obama.
“[Clinton] had let [Obama] down. She had let herself down. She had let her party down. And she had let her country down,” political journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote when describingthe night of the election in their book,Shattered. “Obama’s legacy and the dreams of her presidency lay shattered at Donald Trump’s feet. This was on her.”
“Mr. President,” she told Obama on the phone, according to the book. “I’m sorry.”
Even Obama’s natural buoyancy couldn’t stop him from havingself-doubt and intense anxietyabout the state of the country after the election, Rhodes writes.
“Maybe we pushed too far… Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe,” Obama is quoted as saying inThe World As It Is.
However, the then-president didn’t lose all hope.
“The one thing [Obama] kept coming back to was the expanse of time, the fact that we were just a ‘blip’ in human history,” Rhodes writes. “In giving advice on how to deal with Trump, he offered a simple maxim: ‘Find some high ground, and hunker down.'”
The World As It Isison sale now.
source: people.com
