Trump Is Not Obama's Legacy. He's the Legacy of Anti-Obamaism.
By Jonathan Chait
January 18, 2017
7:00 a.m.
President Obama’s critics spent eight years dismissing his accomplishments as wildly overambitious, or insignificant. (Some of the very same people who accused him of the former, and warned his socialist agenda would lead to devastation, switched to the latter when their doomsday predictions failed to take hold.) Since November, the indictment has come to focus on the election of Donald Trump, an event Obama’s critics on both the left and right see as a kind of divine justice, both negating his agenda and ultimately defining it.
It is more than a bit odd to define a presidency by its successor. Most historians regard Abraham Lincoln as the greatest president in American history, despite the fact that he was immediately followed by the president most of them consider the worst, Andrew Johnson. Yet few people consider Johnson to be a central part of Lincoln’s legacy (even though Lincoln single-handedly enabled Johnson to get the job, by dumping his anti-slavery vice-president, Hannibal Hamlin, and adding the Southern, pro-slavery Johnson to the ticket to help secure his reelection.)
Whether Trump manages to reverse many of Obama’s major accomplishments remains to be seen. Trump’s bid to repeal Obamacare has run into a series of immediate obstacles, beginning with the fact that both the 20 million people who get health care through the law and the doctors, hospitals, and insurers who sell it to them are raising bloody hell about snatching it away. Trump will slow down the green-energy revolution Obama started, but he won’t halt it; the economic logic of affordable clean energy displacing expensive coal, and the diplomatic logic of international cooperation to ratchet down emissions, have taken on a momentum of their own. And the bold actions Obama took to prevent a depression — the stimulus, the bank stress test, and the auto bailout — cannot be undone by definition.
The fashion for blaming Trump on Obama has less to do with any programmatic analysis of the 44th president, though. It is a tic adopted by Obama’s critics — especially those who dislike Trump but wish to vindicate their fervent opposition to Obama. Former Bush administration staffer Peter Wehner argues in the New York Times that Obama not only failed to produce a sufficiently prosperous economy, he failed in his major domestic policy goal:
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