{"id":50091,"date":"2016-11-21T21:23:15","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T21:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=50091"},"modified":"2016-11-22T01:20:18","modified_gmt":"2016-11-22T01:20:18","slug":"obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=50091","title":{"rendered":"Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a>
\n2016-11-28<\/p>\n

David Remnick<\/strong><\/a>, Editor<\/p>\n

Inside a stunned White House<\/a>, the President considers his legacy and America\u2019s future.<\/em><\/p>\n

The morning after Donald Trump<\/a> was elected President of the United States, Barack Obama<\/a> summoned staff members to the Oval Office<\/a>. Some were fairly junior and had never been in the room before. They were sombre, hollowed out, some fighting tears, humiliated by the defeat, fearful of autocracy\u2019s moving vans pulling up to the door. Although Obama and his people admit that the election results caught them completely by surprise\u2014\u201cWe had no plan for this,\u201d one told me\u2014the President sought to be reassuring.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not the apocalypse,\u201d Obama said. History does not move in straight lines; sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it goes backward. A couple of days later, when I asked the President about that consolation, he offered this: \u201cI don\u2019t believe in apocalyptic\u2014until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s insistence on hope felt more willed than audacious. It spoke to the civic duty he felt to prevent despair not only among the young people in the West Wing<\/a> but also among countless Americans across the country. At the White House, as elsewhere, dread and dejection were compounded by shock. Administration officials recalled the collective sense of confidence about the election that had persisted for many months, the sense of balloons and confetti waiting to be released. Last January, on the eve of his final State of the Union address, Obama submitted to a breezy walk-and-talk interview in the White House with the \u201cToday\u201d show. Wry and self-possessed, he told Matt Lauer<\/a> that no matter what happened in the election he was sure that \u201cthe overwhelming majority\u201d of Americans would never submit to Donald Trump\u2019s appeals to their fears, that they would see through his \u201csimplistic solutions and scapegoating.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo when you stand and deliver that State of the Union address,\u201d Lauer said, \u201cin no part of your mind and brain can you imagine Donald Trump standing up one day and delivering the State of the Union address?\u201d…<\/p>\n

Obama chuckled. \u201cWell,\u201d he said, \u201cI can imagine it in a \u2018Saturday Night<\/a>\u2019 skit.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency The New Yorker 2016-11-28 David Remnick, Editor Inside a stunned White House, the President considers his legacy and America\u2019s future. The morning after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Barack Obama summoned staff members to the Oval Office. Some were fairly junior and had never been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,26,20],"tags":[16820,21057,3886],"class_list":["post-50091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-david-remnick","tag-donald-trump","tag-the-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50091"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50108,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50091\/revisions\/50108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}