How Trump’s Election Shook Obama: ‘What if We Were Wrong?’

After Trump took office, I had hoped that I would never have to hear about Barrack Hussein Obama ever again. As it turns out, the further he slips from relevancy, the more enjoyable I find him. The New York Times, covering Ben Rhodes upcoming book in an article titled How Trump’s Election Shook Obama: ‘What if We Were Wrong?’ is so full of spin and hubris that the only way to fully summarize it is to go line by line and comment as necessary.

WASHINGTON — Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory. [First sentence: Obama the great sage truly didn't see it coming.]

“What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.
He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” [Damn backwards rubes need to get out of their tribes and into the progressive era, where you must say exactly what the PC mafia expect you to say, otherwise you are a deplorable bigot.]

His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Mr. Trump. [They sought to reassure him with a hypothetical. Great.] Mr. Obama, the first black man elected president, [After 8 years of presidency, he's still best known as "the black guy."] did not seem convinced. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said. [Imagine the hubris necessary to claim - a year after it's conclusion, that your tenure was just ahead of its time.]

In the weeks after Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Obama went through multiple emotional stages, [Just as we'd expect from the first feminine president.] according to a new book by his longtime adviser Benjamin J. Rhodes. At times, the departing president took the long view, at other points, he flashed anger. He called Mr. Trump a “cartoon” figure who cared more about his crowd sizes than any particular policy. [They can never acknowledge how brilliant Trump is. Which is why I already have money down on his re-election.] And he expressed rare self-doubt, wondering whether he had misjudged his own influence on American history.

Set to be published next week by Random House, Mr. Rhodes’s memoir, “The World as It Is,” [Again with the hubris just off the charts.] offers a peek into Mr. Obama’s tightly sealed inner sanctum from the perspective of one of the few people who saw him up close through all eight years of his presidency. Few moments shook Mr. Obama more than the decision by voters to replace him with a candidate who had questioned his very birth [certificate].

Mr. Rhodes served as Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser through some of the most consequential points of his presidency, including decisions to authorize the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, send more troops to Afghanistan, pull most troops out of Iraq, restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, seal a nuclear agreement with Iran, intervene militarily in Libya and refuse to intervene militarily in Syria. [Jesus you'd have to have amnesia to read the Times. Obama and Kerry both lobbied for weeks to go to war with Iran, but failed to garner support domestically or in Europe. So they engaged in a covert war against Assad by funding radical Islamic insurgents.] 

But his book offers a new window, if only slightly cracked open, into the 44th president’s handling of Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election to help Mr. Trump get elected and the aftermath.
In handing over power to someone determined to tear down all he had accomplished, Mr. Obama alluded to “The Godfather” mafia movie: “I feel like Michael Corleone. I almost got out.” [Obama is just so gangster.] 

Mr. Rhodes describes the reaction of foreign leaders. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan apologized for breaching protocol by meeting with Mr. Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan after the election. Mr. Obama urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada to take on a more vocal role defending the values they shared. [The Canadian boy wonder has done a fine job of that.]

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama that she felt more obliged to run for another term because of Mr. Trump’s election to defend the liberal international order. When they parted for the final time, Ms. Merkel had a single tear in her eye. [Seeing Angela Merkel cry because Trump got elected would bring me more joy than a pool full of puppies.] “She’s all alone,” Mr. Obama noted. [She's all alone, save for her hyperliberal counterparts in Sweden, France, Britain, Ireland, the EU, New Zealand, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland...]

And yet despite criticism even from former advisers to Mr. Obama, Mr. Rhodes offers little sense that the former president thought he could have done more to counter Russian involvement in the election. Mr. Obama had authorized a statement to be issued by intelligence agency leaders a month before the election warning of Russian interference, but was thwarted from doing more because Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, refused to go along with a bipartisan statement. [There's always a Republican to blame. Of course, McConnell had nothing to do with the President's ability to direct the executive branch in response to a foreign threat to our democratic process. We've noted on this blog that Trump likes to set up situations where he wins either way. However it goes, his upside still outweighs his downside. Notice Obama's ability to do the opposite. In the one case, Russia didn't corrupt the outcome of our political process, in which case Obama and all his Democrat allies are liars of the highest order. In the other case, he is the most limp-wristed executive in world history. Listen to what he's saying. He issued a statement! And if it weren't for those meddling Republicans, he could have issued an even stronger statement. Rhodes is making a strong case that Obama was feckless to the extreme.]

Mr. Rhodes called Mr. McConnell’s refusal “staggeringly partisan and unpatriotic.” But Mr. Obama, whose Supreme Court nomination had been blocked by Mr. McConnell for months, seemed less surprised.

“What else did you expect from McConnell?” he asked. “He won’t even give us a hearing on Merrick Garland.” [I never understood why Democrats didn't push back on that harder than they did. Clearly Obama felt powerless about it.]

Still, in preparatory sessions before meetings with the news media before the election, aides pressed Mr. Obama to respond to criticism that he should speak out more about Russian meddling. “I talk about it every time I’m asked,” he responded. “What else are we going to do? We’ve warned folks.” [Can you imagine if that man ever had to defend the country from an actual military threat? Well, I warned folks...]

He noted that Mr. Trump was already claiming that the election would be manipulated if Hillary Clinton won. “If I speak out more, he’ll just say it’s rigged,” Mr. Obama said. [Either way, Trump wins.]

Mr. Rhodes writes that neither he nor Mr. Obama knew at that time that there was an F.B.I. investigation into contacts between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia [this claim will almost certainly be disproven], despite Mr. Trump’s recent unsubstantiated claims [published by the Times] that the departing president placed a “spy” or multiple spies in his campaign.

Mr. Rhodes writes he did not learn about the F.B.I. investigation until after leaving office, and then from the news media. Mr. Obama did not impose sanctions on Russia in retaliation for the meddling before the election because he believed it might prompt Moscow into hacking into Election Day vote tabulations. [Obama could not punish Russia for alleged meddling out of fear of actual meddling.] Mr. Obama did impose sanctions after the election but Mr. Rhodes’s suggestion that the targets include President Vladimir V. Putin was rebuffed on the theory that such a move would go too far. [But statements were issued.]

Mr. Obama and his team were confident that Mrs. Clinton would win and, like much of the country, were shocked when she did not. “I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have seen it coming,” Mr. Rhodes writes. “Because when you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we’d run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used: She’s part of a corrupt establishment that can’t be trusted to bring change.” [Nah, stick with the Russia story. It sounds better than, you know, agreeing with what Trump supporters have been saying the entire time.]

On election night, Mr. Obama spoke by telephone with Cody Keenan, his chief speechwriter, and Mr. Rhodes to figure out what he should say. Mr. Rhodes asked if he should offer reassurance to allies. “No, I don’t think that I’m the one to tell them that,” he said.

The next day, Mr. Obama focused on cheering up his despondent staff. At one point, he sent a message to Mr. Rhodes saying, “There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.”
But days later, Mr. Obama seemed more less sanguine. “I don’t know,” he told aides. “Maybe this is what people want. I’ve got the economy set up well for him. No facts. No consequences. They can just have a cartoon.”

He added that “we’re about to find out just how resilient our institutions are, at home and around the world.”

The day Mr. Obama hosted Mr. Trump at the White House after the election seemed surreal. Mr. Trump kept steering the conversation back to the size of his rallies, noting that he and Mr. Obama could draw big crowds, but Mrs. Clinton could not, Mr. Rhodes writes.

Afterward, Mr. Obama called a few aides to the Oval Office to ruminate on the encounter. “I’m trying to place him in American history,” he said. [Update: he's the cartoon who dismantled almost your entire legacy in about a year.]

“He peddles” bull, Mr. Rhodes answered. “That character has always been part of the American story. You can see it right back to some of the characters in Huckleberry Finn.”

“Maybe,” Mr. Obama answered, “that’s the best we can hope for.” [The best they could hope for was that Trump would renege on his campaign rhetoric as solidly as Obama had.]