The piece was originally published in TOI.
There’s a school of thought popular among Washington watchers that it was Barack Obama’s jibes at Donald Trump during an ill-fated White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011 that might have led to Trump’s presidential run which in turn would upend the rules-based liberal order that came into effect post-World War II and now threatens not just American politics, but the global economy, international business across the world; where the whims and fancies of a former reality TV star could decide the fate of billions of people.
Now there’s no actual way to prove that’s the case any more than one can prove a causal link between fewer pirates and increasing global warming, but there is certainly some meat in the idea that Barack Obama’s overarching legacy led to the birthing of Donald Trump and MAGA, a movement that cannibalised the Republicans and made it a party of individuals whose only ideological position is fealty to the Orange One while destroying the Democratic Party and reducing it to alphabet soup and identity politics.
On the surface, Donald Trump and Barack Obama have little in common. One was born in privilege, has burnt through generations of wealth to be accepted, and speaks like a redneck hillbilly doing stand-up. The other had to rise through his intellect, gumption and hard work, essentially becoming the most polished wielder of the English language since Professor Henry Higgins. But scratch a little deeper and Orange is the New Black.
Critics often juxtapose Trump and Obama with their viral speeches announcing the death of Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden and ISIS chief Abu Bakr-al-Baghdadi (mashed up by the recently re-instated Jimmy Kimmel). Obama, sombre and grave, invoked history and duty, while Trump gave a lesson in comedic enunciation before some backslapping. But deep down the message was the same, though delivered in very different tone and tenor: We are America, and you don’t get to mess with us.
The similarities between Obama and Trump have been highlighted in the past. As a piece by Russel A. Berman from 2016 for the Hoover Institution noted: even their policies weren’t very different — nation-building at home, retracted foreign ambitions, appeals to the working class, rejecting bipartisan foreign policy consensus driven by neoconservatives from the Bush era, and even rhetorics of decline to push the narrative that they would make America the Shining City on the Hill again (MAGA vs Yes We Can).
Both President Obama and Trump share a common vision of the role of the U.S. government in relation to American society as well as to world affairs. They both believe in the urgency of repairing the American domestic condition. Obama’s insistence on the primacy of “nation building at home” is barely distinguishable from Trump’s promise “to make America great again.” In the two cases, the call to address domestic needs appeals to the perceived and real decline of blue-collar jobs and median incomes, even as the wealthy have done very well under the most progressive president since Franklin Roosevelt. Obama, of course, promised “shovel-ready jobs,” but it is now Trump who offers. -Russell A. Berman (Hoover Institution)
Both were avatars of an executive branch unmoored from restraint, presidents who leaned into personality and spectacle to paper over the collapse of consensus. Both are masters of rallying their base for a political cause, and both are masterful orators, though of different styles. But before we chart the rise of Trump, we have to return to where it started: with Barack Hussein Obama, the Chosen One.
The Chosen One
In a powerful book written before the pre-social media era, Noam Chomsky had argued that the powerful “manufactured consent” to ensure the debate never went out of the Overton Window. That was how American democracy functioned since its inception, running on invisible gears, grinding change into increments that soothed everyone — with the sole exceptions of upheavals like the American Civil War. A New Deal here, a Civil Rights Act there. Lyndon Johnson signed away Jim Crow while reassuring Wall Street that the Great Society wasn’t socialism. Change was measured, negotiated, boring.
The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro's friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political "football game" that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives. - Malcom X
That was the normal timeline arc of America if Barack Obama hadn’t arrived, as politics vacillated between familiar grooves of moderate liberals and conservatives — a Hillary Clinton here, a Mitt Romney there, perhaps John McCain, Joe Biden, or even a Jeb Bush. People who would grind out results without breaking the status quo, ensuring progress at a pace that didn’t cause alarm.
But then Barack Obama came as the Chosen One who threw the Force of American democracy off-balance. He was, to paraphrase the Architect from The Matrix, the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of America — an anomaly that couldn’t be restricted or eliminated from a harmony of white male centrists.
Obama was so charismatic, so telegenic, so historically inevitable that liberals mistook him for destiny itself. He was cast as an amalgamation of Martin Luther King Jr. meeting Denzel Washington, an orator who could sell anything. And he sold it like nobody else. Under him, same-sex marriage became mainstream, marijuana legalisation went from taboo to TED Talk, rainbow lights glowed on the White House as though history itself had signed off.
Liberals had found their cheat code to push through every progressive agenda: from the environment to identity politics. But they took things too far. Suddenly, they were attacking anyone who didn’t think boys and girls should play on the same team or use the same bathroom. Even science bent to wokeism, abandoning Merton’s Principles, castigating anyone who dared point out that sex wasn’t a spectrum or that maybe there was no need to let children change their genders.
What had been incremental became inevitable. Democrats fell off the cliff of sanity, thinking obscure acronyms were more important than economics, that the Blue Wall could never be broken, that morality would, like some bizarre Keynesian analogy, trickle down to everyday Americans. And yet, they forgot the deeper roots of American culture — the racism, misogyny, patriarchy — that had ensured that before Obama every single president was a white male.
For a while it worked. But in making it too easy, liberals torched the one thing that had kept America together: consensus.
It wasn’t just America: the Obama delusion took over the world.
Obama Delulu became a mass pandemic across the global liberal order, where liberals started pushing candidates who talked the talk instead of walking the walk, creating a plethora of leaders from Justin Trudeau to Jacinda Ardern who were easy prey for populists.
And the edifice of it was the man who got a Nobel Peace Prize for simply existing — a prize normally reserved for tyrants and warmongers, though Obama would earn his stripes down the line, even joking with aides that he was “really good at killing people.” His charisma rode slipshod over facts. Liberals didn’t see past the horizon because, to borrow a line from his successor, they were winning so much that they got tired of winning.
Conservatives hated him but couldn’t do much beyond attacking his race. Obama fused morality and murder into a single brand, and in doing so, bent the presidency further into a one-man machine — a problem that Anti-Federalists had worried about from the beginning.
As David French reminded readers in The New York Times, the anxiety was over one deceptively simple clause: “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.” It was too vague, too open to abuse, waiting for a corruptible individual.
Quotes
The fundamental goal of the founding of America was to discard the British monarchy, to establish a republican form of government. We see this in Benjamin Franklin’s famous response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
“A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”
Many of the Constitution’s flaws remain hidden when America is governed by decent men but become obvious and dangerous when it is not. Poor character creates a constitutional stress test, and it can reveal fatal defects in much the same way that a physical stress test can expose flaws in your heart. And nowhere are those flaws more apparent than in Article II, the article that created the American presidency. We should consider a change. The fundamental goal of the founding of America was to discard the British monarchy, to establish a republican form of government. We see this in Benjamin Franklin’s famous response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”“A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.” - David French (The New York Times)
French, as is wont for the politics of those who write for the Times, identified the problem with Trump. But the truth is that Obama had already stretched Article II into a cult of personality, proving how charisma and unilateral action could override consensus. Trump simply picked up the template and exaggerated it.
The Democratic Godfather
With time, Obama became a maelstrom at the gates of hell. His pyrrhic legacy burned consensus. He pushed through the Affordable Care Act but inevitably burned the bridge of bipartisanship. The Tea Party rose on its ashes, Democrats were obliterated in the 2010 midterms, and Obama spent the rest of his tenure explaining why the Chosen One couldn’t actually get much done. The hectoring professor had won the seminar but lost the country.
Sadly for Democrats, the Obama Show never ended. The party kept waiting for another one like him, abandoning the pugilist, debating style of consensus that forges new leaders. The last time the DNC had an honest debate was 2008. Four years later Bernie Sanders was scuttled in favour of Hillary Clinton. Joe Biden was handpicked to be the consensus candidate in 2020. And by 2024, the final act: Kamala Harris as candidate, sold as a DEI hire, who couldn’t muster a single vote in 2020 but was suddenly crowned.
From Poetry to Farce
And this was the deeper wound. Before Obama, America’s divides were real but manageable. After Obama, consensus was dead. Republicans opposed him reflexively, even on policies they had once championed, with race as the unspoken accelerant. Democrats, intoxicated by the speed of cultural victories, convinced themselves the culture war was theirs to win. In reality, identity hardened into tribalism, each liberal victory proof to conservatives that “their” America had been stolen.
By 2016, Trump wasn’t an aberration but the logical sequel. Where Obama had shown the power of a presidency fused with spectacle, Trump exaggerated it, deriding institutions, norms, even facts themselves. Where Obama bent the order toward identity and representation, Trump bent it back toward resentment and exclusion. Together, they created a feedback loop in which every American issue — healthcare, immigration, policing, climate, trade — became an existential battle.
And then came 2024. Trump survived the full might of the American political system — impeachments, indictments, bans from social media, even an assassination attempt — and emerged stronger. It almost became impossible to argue that he hadn’t been Chosen after surviving the assassination attempt, that he was God’s Chosen Warrior.
What had started as Obama’s anomaly ended with Trump as a different beast altogether: the man who was exactly like Obama and still his opposite. On the surface, they were opposites: the Harvard orator versus the real-estate brawler. But in their own way, Obama and Trump are the two sides of the American coin — both stretching the executive, both personalising politics, both leaving the nation more divided than before. One anomaly made history; the other turned it into farce. And America, stuck between poetry and parody, may never find consensus again.
Obama once said Yes We Can. Little did he know it meant handing America over to permanent division — a country where his rise made Trump inevitable. And the final irony? Obama’s famous roast at Trump was delivered because Trump was pushing the racist birther conspiracy. Yet it was Barack who ended up birthing Trump and a permanent fracture in American democracy.
Wonderfully explained. Same wine different bottles.