Obama Insiders Try to Explain Trump Phenomenon, Fail Spectacularly
“It’s not so much a reaction to Obama,” one person familiar with the president’s thinking told Politico. “It’s more of a reaction to their strategy that, ‘We’re just going to be antithetical to everything [Obama] stands for.’”
Yeah, that sounds exactly like Obama's thinking: Gee, if only the intransigent "party of no" had gone along with my agenda without a fight, there would be no Trump.
But on everything from guns to reproductive health to opening up Cuba, Obama’s team says it has been battling for years the very politics that paved the way for Trump’s ascendance this election cycle.Translation: this wouldn't be happening had the GOP given Obama his way on gun control etc.
Of course Obama's flacks are 180 degrees wrong, as they usually are. The reason for the Trump temper tantrum is not because Republicans opposed Obama's agenda too much -- it is because they didn't oppose him enough. The GOP was given the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014 and its conservative base feels like they've gotten bupkis out of the deal. Republicans have caved to Obama almost as many times as Obama has caved to the mullahs in Iran.
People in the White House tell Politico that "Obama doesn’t talk about Trump much," which is nice, but --
When he does, it’s with a combination of amusement and disgust at the rhetoric, occasionally mentioning his amazement at GOP leaders’ inability to understand Trump’s supporters and the long-term damage the president thinks Trump is doing to the party with the groups of voters who will decide future elections.It should come as no surprise that Obama thinks he understands Trump supporters better than anyone else. He's simply better at politics than anyone else -- and he'll be the first one to tell you that.
“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.” So of course he's got the Trump phenomenon all figured out.
In addition to the GOP's not rolling over enough to suit Obama's needs, there's another factor at work here that explains voter anger, according to the White House. And that factor begins with the letter "R."
Aides say Trump played into fears and racism and encouraged voter distrust of the president, as he’s doing now on the campaign trail.Obama administration alumni remember hearing what they call the “those people” strain of politics when they were knocking on doors in 2008. It was evident at rallies for Sarah Palin and at tea party events in the first term of his presidency. Americans weren’t wrong to think Obama’s election in 2008 meant the country had changed — the president himself bought into it and was frustrated in the early years to see how slowly it translated into policy accomplishments.See? Some people think that the Tea Party movement was born out of principled opposition to the increase in spending and expansion of government that was in the bloated 2009 stimulus bill. They now stand corrected. It was because he looks different than they do and has "a funny name."
