A year ago today, The New Republic published Brian Beutler’s piece: Obama Is Warning America About Trump’s Presidency. Are You Listening?. The occasion was a press conference President Obama gave two days prior, on November 14th. It’s worth revisiting both Beutler’s article and Obama’s warnings.
As Beutler pointed out, President Obama was outwardly upbeat but the subtext of what he was saying was terrifying. While Obama promised to be as helpful as possible and noted repeatedly that Trump would not face the same kind of instant calamities that he had faced at the beginning of his presidency, he clearly did not think Trump was temperamentally fit to be president and did not predict success.
One concern was proper staffing.
“The most important point I made,” Obama told reporters at the White House, referring to his conversation last week with Trump, “was that how you staff—particularly your chief of staff, your national security adviser, your White House counsel, how you set up a process and a system to surface information, generate options for a president, understanding that ultimately the president is going to be the final decision maker, that that’s something that’s going to have to be attended to right away.”
That’s seem prescient in retrospect, considering that Trump’s first National Security Adviser lasted only a few weeks and his first chief of staff only a little over half a year. We can do down the list from there, to include Steve Bannon, Sean Spicer, and several other important members of his initial team.
Another concern was Trump’s lack of respect for the truth.
“I think there will be certain elements of his temperament that will not serve him well unless he recognizes them and corrects them,” Obama added, “because when you’re a candidate and you say something that is inaccurate or controversial, it has less impact than it does when you’re president of the United States. Everybody around the world is paying attention, markets moves. National security issues require a level of precision in order to make sure you don’t make mistakes. I think he recognizes that this is different.”
Trump has blundered on foreign policy matters from the outset, including famously his treatment of Taiwan and his refusal to commit to NATO’s Article Five mutual defense provision. But it’s his bombast and imprecision on North Korea policy that had the Senate Foreign Relations Committee exploring ways to limit his ability to start a nuclear war earlier this week.
Obama was also clearly worried that Trump would not abide by rules, laws and norms and that this would land him in hot water:
“One of the things you discover about being president is that there are all these rules and norms and laws and you’ve got to pay attention to them,” Obama said, as if the president-elect weren’t a 70-year-old person with a fancy education. “The people who work for you are also subject to those rules and norms. And that’s a piece of advice that I gave to the incoming president.”
“We listened to the lawyers,” Obama said, “and we had a strong White House Counsel’s Office. We had a strong Ethics Office. We had people in every agency whose job it was to remind people, this is how you’re supposed to do things…. We had to just try to institutionalize this as much as we could. And that takes a lot of work. And one of my suggestions to the incoming president is, is that he take that part of the job seriously, as well.”
Trump could not possibly have taken those concerns less seriously. His violations of the Emoluments Clause are staggering, and his appointment of his daughter and son-in-law created immediate problems for him. His decision to fire James Comey is perhaps his greatest mistake, but his lack of respect for norms is seen clearly on a daily basis, from his displeasure with Jeff Sesssions’s recusal to his pressure on the Department of Justice to investigate Hillary Clinton.
Obama was restrained in what he said last year, but his warnings were clear and, unfortunately, very accurate.
Warnings are nice, but nothing heats a cold house like hate.
Well, #2 heating oil does. But hate is free.
Heating oil?
Hahaha…so quaint.
.
Trump could not possibly have taken those concerns less seriously. His violations of the Emoluments Clause are staggering, and his appointment of his daughter and son-in-law created immediate problems for him. His decision to fire James Comey is perhaps his greatest mistake, but his lack of respect for norms is seen clearly on a daily basis, from his displeasure with Jeff Sesssions’s recusal to his pressure on the Department of Justice to investigate Hillary Clinton.
Try this version:
Republicans who control Congress could not possibly have taken those concerns less seriously. Trump’s violations of the Emoluments Clause are staggering, and his appointment of his daughter and son-in-law created immediate problems for him. His decision to fire James Comey is perhaps his greatest mistake, but his lack of respect for norms is seen clearly on a daily basis, from his displeasure with Jeff Sesssions’s recusal to his pressure on the Department of Justice to investigate Hillary Clinton.
Trump doesn’t care about any of that and his followers don’t understand or care about any of that. I sometimes wonder what would happen if you grabbed a bunch of Trump supporters off the street and made them listen through several days of foreign and domestic policy Presidential briefings.
They would fall asleep or start raging in about 10 minutes. What decision making at the highest levels is like is utterly beyond their ability to comprehend.
Normal people who don’t watch Fox News have known for decades that government complexity can’t be replaced by “Get ‘er Done!” homilies. That’s why up till now, all our Presidents had to pretend at least that they were highly intelligent and had a wide range of knowledge.
The Pundits even refer to it as “Presidential Gravitas” – seriousness befitting the Leader of the Free World (as the Press often styles the President). Trump never had any of that and his followers didn’t care then or now.
So, the fact that he’s screwing up the environment (they hate “environmental wackos”), women’s rights (“Libbers!”) and the world economy (“What other countries? We just know about Harlan County down here, and we want to mine more coal!”) doesn’t faze them at all.
We have a President who speaks for an Electoral College majority that want to burn down the country entirely. Most of them think the end-times are upon us anyway and Jesus will be here soon.
So, who cares about anything? God will soon be here to judge the quick and the dead, so pile the turds in the front lawn! The more the merrier!
He tried that on for size:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNEBuSk7X1A
Should have added – And don’t appoint any members of the opposing party to your cabinet.
Seven years later the GOP has successfully painted itself into a corner over health care reform.
And now, they have painted themselves into a corner with tax reform trying to repeal Obamacare.
And Trump has shown that all of Obama’s advice to a new President was resented and rejected.
The reaction will come when the public is clear about the realities. Too bad no one publishes the text of bills anymore. The “tax bill” should make Obamacare look simple and short.
And why bother with legislation or appointments when you can send Mick Nulvaney to sabotage CFPB. It’s the way Nixon tried to destroy the Office of Economic Opportunity.
Obama never could straight up warn about conservative risks without causing a blowback reversal–rightwing jiu-jitsu based in racism. Sometimes the modulation obscured the content from too many.
And Republicans do not believe that there are rules and norms and you’ve got to pay attention to them. For the GOP, they can be blown away as a practical inconvenience just like when the stability of an election date and candidate inconvenience a rapidly dropping GOP candidate.
But remember. The Democrats only let their brand symbolically die in the middle of the road. The Republicans change the regulations to allow their brand to be killed in reality.
Eagles likely is next.
. . . Thomas.
RE:
Always good to have a reality check!
the problem with bills these days is they usually just amend other laws, especially the ACA
I read a few and couldn’t figure out what they did until I started going down a rabbit hole of laws and even then I wasn’t 100% sure.
It’s just not that simple anymore
We’re dealing with voters who think Trump is “the most diligent, hardest-working president we’ve ever had in our lifetimes” and who think Obama is literally — literally the “Antichrist” (not to mention a “secret Muslim.”
I mean, sometimes I just want to give up, you know?
Yes, sometimes I want to give up.
I have literally heard Trump fanatics say exactly what you typed there – word for word.
It amazed & depressed me the first time I heard either sentiment eminating from a GOP voter’s word hole. Now I just get depressed when I hear it, and I seem to hear both sentiments all too often.
We are deep in the mud & do-do of Animal Farm at this point.
Shit, Obama warned Republicans back in 2010 when he accepted the invitation to come to their Congressional caucus and schooled them in public about the ACA and other issues.
He told them explicitly that they were creating problems for themselves by saying such risible and absurd things about him and the policies and regulations he was pursuing. The President pointed out in 2010 that they were eliminating their ability to govern effectively because they would be punished by their misinformed voters for doing so.
The Republicans couldn’t have cared less. They saw Barack Obama as a radical, dangerous black man, not a President. So they and their entire movement continued, and continues, to poison Americans, day by day.