Why Obama’s White House didn’t ‘see Trump coming’

When Barack Obama teased Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011, the man who helped write the withering speech enjoyed “seeing how angry” Trump got, but did not imagine the businessman would one day become president, said The Telegraph.

The disclosure is part of a new oral history of the Obama years that shows that although the Democrat “took on recession, healthcare and Iraq”, what “he didn’t see coming was Trump”, said The New York Times.

Chuckles and anger

For eight years, Obama’s aides “marvelled” that “no amount of mockery, dismissal or scandal could make Donald Trump go away”, said The Associated Press. Their “bewilderment” is “threaded through hundreds of interviews” with officials released in the “far-reaching history of the Obama presidency”, which is the most extensive set of interviews to emerge so far from those years.

The testimonies, released for “the perusal of historians, researchers and the merely curious”, said The New York Times, don’t include interviews with the Obamas or Joe Biden, but do include significant figures like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Oprah Winfrey.

At the fateful 2011 dinner, speechwriter Jon Favreau was “revelling in the effect of his words”, said The Telegraph. The decision to mock Trump “stemmed from aggravation” over the “continuing lies” about Obama’s birthplace, said The New York Times. “I thought what he was doing was racist,” recalled Favreau, but “not even a brief moment” did he believe Trump would become a political force.

However, David Axelrod, another member of Obama’s team, walked by Trump’s table that evening and overheard the businessman saying he was toying with running for president. Axelrod, in his own words, “chuckled at it and went to my seat”.

‘Demagogic bloviating’

The Obama administration “failed to spot the threat of Trump”, said The New York Times, because they thought him “a thorn in the side with his birther lies and demagogic bloviating”. To them, he was just a “con man,” a “clown,” a “laughing stock.”

But they “missed the shifting mood of the country”. It’s “striking” how “inconceivable” it seemed to Obama and his team that “populist disenchantment with the establishment, globalisation and demographic changes would elevate a figure they scorned”.

The “picture that emerges from the interviews” is a “collapsing popular belief in a system that simply could not, seemingly for its own psychological reasons, grasp what was truly going on”, said The Telegraph. There was a “failure to come to terms with the realities of the moment”.

“It was hard” not to take Trump’s 2016 election victory “personally”, said former White House press secretary Josh Earnest, because the “essence” of Trump’s being, and “everything that he stood for” were “anathema to everything” that the “Obama era” had “been about”.

Obama “started out, like so many”, viewing Trump as “little more than a comical, if malevolent, real-estate hawker”, said The New Yorker. But as well as failing to “anticipate Trump’s victory”, he “failed to comprehend the degree” to which the Republican would, “particularly in his second term, set out to demolish the principles and the institutions” that Obama held dear.