Transition from Obama to Trump likely to be seamless

Barack Obama is leaving office with a reputation for scholarly detachment.

In 2009, newly elected president Barack Obama mocked his tenpin bowling skills as “like the Special Olympics or something”. Meryl Streep did not mention this in her speech at the recent Golden Globe Awards. She may well have done. The coarseness of contemporary American politics, which she bemoaned, did not start when Donald Trump ran for president.

Obama is leaving office with a reputation for scholarly detachment. He is the intellectual-in-chief. This has always struck me as a caricature. When not reading from an autocue, Obama is reliably, boilerplate Democratic. He may have run on hope and change in 2008. By 2012, his winning campaign slogan was “Bin Laden is dead. GM is alive!”

If Trump, having killed a nasty Islamist and having kept a carbon polluting industry afloat, runs in 2020 he will be roundly pilloried. Hollywood will go to town on his boorish rhetoric and religious intolerance. Streep will likely weep again.

But this style is not unique to him. Trump inherited a political culture from Obama; he did not invent it.

It is worth recalling how similar both men’s campaign pitches were, in 2008 and 2016 respectively. “Elect me,” they both claimed, “because I am the cure for insider politics. Elect me because I am unsullied by high political office. Elect me because by sheer force of my unusual life history and personal charisma I can restore the American dream.” Even their wives made the same claim to office as each other.

Likewise, Obama and Trump exploited identity politics. Both men have much to teach on how political power can be secured by raising racial consciousness. Their style of doing so is different, the substance is the same: “My race confers on me privileges and a cause that can make America great. My ethnicity is a reason to vote for me.” And their most significant political opponent is not one another but Hillary Clinton. And they both beat her — another thing they have in common. A co-authored book by them on how to do this would make for compelling reading.

The desire to see in Trump the anti-Obama is to misread both men. We are likely to see far more continuity from one to the other. This will disappoint their supporters and detractors.

But the lesson of presidential transitions is that they tend to be non-revolutionary. Promises of fundamental change rarely materialise. If you hate Trump, this will be reassuring. If you voted for him, it won’t be.

In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower promised to up-end the failing foreign policy of the man he replaced. Instead, he ended up running a cheaper version of the Truman Doctrine. In 1960, a young and dynamic John Kennedy was the apparent polar opposite of the stroke-addled Eisenhower. Within months, JFK was speeding up an obsession with Vietnam begun by the older man.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was credited with a revolution away from the enervating Jimmy Carter. Instead, he continued the arms build-up begun by him.

After 2008, Obama proved himself to be far more like George W. Bush than an antidote to the Texan. Obama quickly superseded Bush in the numbers of terrorists killed extrajudicially and was complicit in the invasion of a Muslim land — Libya — where regime change was achieved without UN approval.

Obama’s refusal to engage in the Syrian civil war has probably caused more Muslim deaths than Bush’s invasion of Iraq. His weakness in the face of Russian revanchism in Ukraine and Syria is at least as significant as Bush’s when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia in 2008.

Global politics remain highly immune to the US electoral calendar. A new White House occupant does not change longstanding calculations of national interest made in Moscow and Beijing.

For sure, Trump will change the tone and delivery method of his positions, but the substance is likely to endure.

Like Obama, he will continue to sign terrorist “kill lists”. Like Obama, he will cite the US national interest as a reason to avoid international commitments. Like Obama, he has already acknow­ledged that Russia enjoys huge room for manoeuvre in its own back yard — and like Obama in 2009 is offering Putin another “reset”.

Trump’s China policy may sound more bellicose than Obama’s but that won’t change the fundamental co-dependence of Sino-American trade or the level of US debt held by the Chinese government.

His attempt to stem the flow of jobs abroad will founder for the same reason they did for Obama: not on the rocks of Mexican and Chinese perfidy but on technological innovation. Year-on-year, making stuff requires fewer and fewer people.

Even if one disputes their similar agency, it is harder to dismiss structure.

They both inhabit the same constitution. Same institutional rivalry. Same international system. Presidential failure has become a basic feature of American politics because these structures are nearly impossible to shift.

If you fear Trump, this may give you some succour and if you loved Obama it may make you depressed. The office itself is simply not up to the task that the wider political culture demands of it.

All US presidents are now judged on a Bartlet-Underwood scale. The West Wing’s fictional Josiah “Jed” Bartlet possessed such progressive political virtue that he was able to realise great things. In the American reboot of House of Cards, Frank Underwood enjoys a similar capacity to move events in his favour, even if for more nefarious ends.

Both characters perpetuate the misapprehension that the president is crucial to his own success. This makes for great TV but creates an impossible expectation for a president who must govern in real life.

Ironically, it may be Trump who suffers more from this unrealisable hope.

He grew famous for being the decider, the firer, and Washington, let alone Beijing, New Delhi, and Moscow, will allow him very few opportunities to play that role. Like Obama, he will find that his public persona and considerable charisma are not enough to revolutionise the most successful constitutional republic in world history.

As a Romanian proverb reminds us, “a change of leader is the joy of fools”.

Tim Lynch is associate professor in American politics at the University of Melbourne.