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As indicated above, I’ve only read the preface so far, but one thing stands out from the first sentence: It is the real voice of Barack Obama—the voice most of us have come to know so intimately after years of listening to his speeches. It is an unmistakable voice, clear, honest, and above all, human, with a genuine quality of humility that is impossible to feign or duplicate.
In the very first paragraph of the book (excerpted here alongside an interview Obama gave to The Atlantic), Donald Trump is referenced; specifically, Obama refers to that jarring moment when it became evident that “someone diametrically opposed to everything we stood for had been chosen as my successor.”
Reading this couldn’t be called a revelation, but perhaps it provided a moment of clarity. This holiday season, tens of millions of people are likely to be getting a copy of this book, since after five weeks, it remains the top nonfiction bestseller. This fact must be particularly unbearable for Donald Trump, as his own truncated tenure comes to its ignominious close and he is finally shown the door. As his bitter attempts to construct an alternative reality for himself and his supporters ultimately spent themselves, meeting rejection after rejection by our country’s institutions, the contrast between Trump’s infantile hysterics and Obama’s understated class and grace could not be more clear.
In the final days of a disastrous presidency, millions of Americans throughout this country will be reading a memoir written by someone with a fundamental decency that Donald Trump could never achieve in his wildest Twitter-fueled fantasies. Not only would Trump have been intellectually incapable of producing such an introspective self-examination of his tenure, but it’s already obvious that he never, ever will have the kind of national and global respect that Obama commanded (and continues to receive) after his two terms in office had ended.
Nearly every facet and implication about Trump’s disgraceful, unseemly and prolonged exit from power over the past six weeks that could be said has been said. But what hasn’t been pointed out much is something obvious and in plain sight: By defeating him in this election, President-elect Joe Biden has once and for all crushed Trump’s singular motivation, one that’s been glaringly visible throughout the last four years: his fervent desire to erase Barack Obama’s place in history.
Trump has failed to do that, and failed miserably—and that has to be the most galling thing for him.
What kind of memoir could Donald Trump produce now? Whatever it is, we know it won’t be written by him. He doesn’t have the skills, the attention span, or the interest to write such a thing, and quite honestly, he has done very little for the country that is worth writing about. Is someone really interested in revisiting how his signature abetted the largest corporate tax cut in history, vastly enriching the wealthiest in this country while providing little but token scraps to the vast majority of Americans? That’s hardly the stuff memoirs are made of. Are his legions of frothing, conspiracy-addled, and racist rednecks in America’s heartland going to thrill to read about his failed wall, or his cruel, senseless immigration policies, over and over again? Or his obsession with de-regulating our environmental protections? How is he going to present reneging on the Paris Climate Accord, abandoning the Iran Nuclear Treaty, or his trade war with China as somehow interesting or heroic?
When every one of your achievements yields a net negative for the American people, what do you write about in your memoir?
It’s painfully obvious that Trump doesn’t have the mental wherewithal to provide a verifiable record of what he’s done in office, let alone to convey something that would interest others. From all accounts he has been a ghastly human being to work with, unable to retain anyone but the most slavish sycophants for more than a few months at a time. Is someone going to actually care about anything he did that would make a ghost-written, phony tome worth promoting, let alone reading?
No one is going to be inviting Trump to bask in the glory of the world’s stage. Neither he nor his family will ever be re-admitted to those nice parties thrown by the noblesse oblige of our polite society. Culturally, Trump has nothing to look forward to, save those rabid, spewing rallies in front of people he neither respects nor has anything personally in common with. His children may achieve some further notoriety and gaudy fame among the right-wing bubble-sphere, but the highest strata of American society and the rest of the world will give anyone named Trump the cold shoulder.
Trump never had a policy agenda beyond acting as a rubber stamp for whatever the political right needed in order to stay in power, and thus, continue to enjoy the limelight. Because he always felt insecure about following in Obama’s footsteps, and because he is, in fact, an out-and-out racist, the only thing that mattered to him was to get Obama out of his head. From trying and failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, to denigrating the achievements of Obama’s foreign policy, to wiping out every regulation he could find that his predecessor had instituted to better the lives of Americans, Trump’s entire tenure has been driven by this one, overwhelming fixation.
But ultimately, when given the opportunity to render their verdict on Trump’s entire term, rather than reelect him, the American people chose instead to replace him with Obama’s former vice president.
And while Trump sits and watches as whatever power he once had rapidly fades away, meanwhile, people are lining up in droves to read the memoirs of the most-respected president of the 21st century. That fact will haunt him for the rest of his life.
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