Barack Obama stalks the empty corridors of Donald Trump’s stunted brain as the personification of everything that Trump wishes he were but is decidedly not. Casually self assured. Innately intelligent and intellectually curious. Cultured and elegant. Married to woman who loves him. Assured of a place in history rather than banished to the rogues gallery of infamy.
Or as Charles M. Blow puts it:
“Trump wants to be Obama — held in high esteem. But, alas, Trump is Trump, and that is now and has always been trashy. Trump accrued financial wealth, but he never accrued cultural capital, at least not among the people from whom he most wanted it.”
To Trump and his yahoo followers the degree to which Barack Obama is held in esteem here in America and abroad is an affront to everything that their shriveled and pathetic worldview proposes and attempts to propagate. The superiority of the white race. The exceptionalism of an America washed clean of not only it’s original sin of slavery but also of it’s current delict of economic hegemony, wherein the great corporations of the nineteen and early twentieth centuries busily strip the third world of precious resources to feed into the hungry maw of its grasping capitalism.
Trump embraces both America’s original and contemporary defects, bawling out an already reputiated credo to his base of followers that maintains that America knows no fault, that its past is something to be aspired to, rather than, in his predecessor’s estimation, gently rebuked. This contast is, of course, one of the reasons the world holds Trump in contempt.
“Trump and many of his key policies are broadly unpopular around the globe, and ratings for the U.S. have declined steeply in many nations. According to a new Pew Research Center survey spanning 37 nations, a median of just 22 percent has confidence in Trump to do the right thing when it comes to international affairs. This stands in contrast to the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when a median of 64 percent expressed confidence in Trump’s predecessor to direct America’s role in the world.”
Despite the dismal aberration that Trump represents, Barack Obama is America’s future. A multi cultural admix of the talents and abilities of each part of i’s profound diversity, a nation attempting to free itself of the burdens of the past and embracing the possibilities of it’s future.
Trump can hamfistedly seek to to delay this happy day, as he clumsily tries to undo the indelible legacy that Obama has stamped upon our image, but he will fail.
Because he is a loser.
And, this, of course, is the self knowledge that the failed businessman and human Donald Trump desperately seeks to expunge from his hamster wheel of a brain as he attempts to eradicate the achievements of his moral and political superior.
“For Trump, even plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act aren’t so much about creating better policy as they are about dismantling Obama’s legacy. The problem with Obamacare isn’t that it hasn’t borne fruit, but rather that it bears Obama’s name.
For Trump, the mark of being a successful president is the degree to which he can expunge Obama’s presidency.”