In 17 months, he has effectively erased Barack Obama's two-term legacy.
If Obama managed to shift resources, ever so incrementally, toward the middle class and the poor, Trump has done the opposite, by doubling down on unprecedented economic inequality, and borrowing unimaginable sums to disproportionately benefit the unimaginably wealthy.
On trade, Trump ended Obama's central initiative in Asia, the TPP. On the environment, the issue I suspect that will loom far, far larger in retrospect, Obama used his executive regulatory powers in an attempt to nudge and coax the economy away from carbon.
Yes, there is no undoing of the deeper market and technological trends that are making renewable energy more affordable; but if you take the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seriously, even Obama's energy legacy was insufficient to the scale of the task.
In less than two years, he has wrecked an Atlantic alliance that every president has defended and advanced since the Second World War, and that Obama nurtured.
Health care? Again, we'd like to believe that the Republican failure to repeal Obamacare means that Obama wins in the end.
What drives Trump is racial essentialism, a rage at the post-racial, integrative center that the mixed-race Obama represented.
Obama began his speech by noting the "Nation's original sin of slavery," but declared that the aim of his campaign was to continue "The long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America." Although "We may have different stories, we hold common hopes," Obama averred.
If Trump has destroyed Obama's substantive legacy at home and abroad, the left has gutted Obama's post-racial cultural vision.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/obamas-legacy-has-already-been-destroyed.html
If Obama managed to shift resources, ever so incrementally, toward the middle class and the poor, Trump has done the opposite, by doubling down on unprecedented economic inequality, and borrowing unimaginable sums to disproportionately benefit the unimaginably wealthy.
On trade, Trump ended Obama's central initiative in Asia, the TPP. On the environment, the issue I suspect that will loom far, far larger in retrospect, Obama used his executive regulatory powers in an attempt to nudge and coax the economy away from carbon.
Yes, there is no undoing of the deeper market and technological trends that are making renewable energy more affordable; but if you take the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seriously, even Obama's energy legacy was insufficient to the scale of the task.
In less than two years, he has wrecked an Atlantic alliance that every president has defended and advanced since the Second World War, and that Obama nurtured.
Health care? Again, we'd like to believe that the Republican failure to repeal Obamacare means that Obama wins in the end.
What drives Trump is racial essentialism, a rage at the post-racial, integrative center that the mixed-race Obama represented.
Obama began his speech by noting the "Nation's original sin of slavery," but declared that the aim of his campaign was to continue "The long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America." Although "We may have different stories, we hold common hopes," Obama averred.
If Trump has destroyed Obama's substantive legacy at home and abroad, the left has gutted Obama's post-racial cultural vision.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/obamas-legacy-has-already-been-destroyed.html
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