The president has a cordial relationship with his successor, who questioned his birthplace and whom he called ‘unfit’ and ‘unprepared’ to enter the Oval Office
Last Saturday, a phone rang at the White House. The caller was requesting the president. The message was relayed and Barack Obama returned the call. On the other end of the line was Donald Trump.
All that is known about the conversation is that it lasted 45 minutes. What was discussed, and in what tone, is not matter of record and is perhaps familiar only to the two men. But it is not the only time that the soon-to-be 45th president has called the 44th in what must be the most peculiar handover of modern times.
Obama was as aghast as anyone when Trump upended the establishment and confounded the wisdom of pollsters to defeat Hillary Clinton last month. But he did his sacred democratic duty to ensure a smooth transition of power, insisting he was now rooting for Trump’s success.
Some observers claim he is still in denial about the imminent erasure of his presidency and at risk of normalising a demagogue. Others argue he is playing a game of “psychological jujitsu”, to maintain influence over his successor.
“He’s doing his best to put lipstick on a pig,” said Neil Sroka, spokesman for the liberal group Democracy for America. “He has a constitutional obligation to ensure there is a swift and easy transfer of power but, when he leaves office, I hope to see him do more to call out the bigoted and hateful elements of Trump’s agenda.”
It is hard to imagine anyone more different from the cerebral, discreet “no drama” Obama, 55, than the blowhard, rabble-rousing 70-year-old Trump, who pushed the notion that the president was actually born in Kenya. During the election campaign they made little secret of their mutual contempt. Obama described Trump as “unfit” and “woefully unprepared”, warning that if he were to win all the progress of the past eight years “goes down the drain”.
Days later he was welcoming the New York billionaire to the Oval Office for a meeting that lasted 90 minutes. How every journalist, historian and comedian in the country yearned to be a fly on that wall. “Can you imagine?” asked the late-night TV host Stephen Colbert. “Just put yourself in that room, that private room, when they were together.
“Can you imagine? Awkward! The first African American president sitting down with a president-elect who was endorsed by the [Ku Klux] Klan, a guy who spent five years – created his political career – demanding Obama prove where he was born, then denying he did it. What did they talk about?”
Perhaps Obama will spill the beans one day. At first he described it as “an excellent conversation” and gave Trump a friendly tap on the arm, but later his biographer David Remnick asked him how the meeting had really gone.
“He smiled thinly,” Remnick wrote in the New Yorker, “and said, ‘I think I can’t characterise it without…’ Then he stopped himself and said that he would tell me ‘at some point over a beer – off the record’.”
The president-elect then set about the transition, with daily meetings at Trump Tower, a slew of cabinet appointments and, apparently, Obama on speed dial. Trump’s senior aide Kellyanne Conway claimed the pair had been “talking regularly” and Trump was enjoying it. “They get along nicely,” she told NBC’s Meet the Press. “They disagree on many things. That’s not going to change.”
Among the White House press corps, there was intrigue over the calls. When a reporter asked how often Obama and Trump had talked, spokesman Josh Earnest replied: “There are a handful of times.”
The reporter pressed: “A handful? Five times?
And asked about the tone of the conversations – “are they like best pals when they’re on the phone together? Or is it tense?” – Earnest insisted that he would respect Trump’s confidentiality and characterised it as “a consultation”.
The press corps had another pointed question. “So given that they’ve had these conversations, does the president have more confidence in the ability of Donald Trump to run the country?”
Earnest answered bluntly: “I’m not aware that the president has changed his assessment. But I can tell you that the president is committed to living up to the responsibility … to put the interest of the country ahead of his own political preferences.”
Almost every day, Earnest, the urbane public face of the administration, is showered with questions about Trump and forced to bite his lip. He acknowledges Obama’s disagreements with his successor, and occasionally what achievements are at risk, but cannot let rip at the man who threatens to destroy the president’s painstakingly constructed legacy. Instead, he cites the transition from George W Bush to Obama as a model for the integrity of the republic.
Obama, too, has spoken of Trump’s “gifts” and “gregarious” nature and claimed hopefully: “This office has a way of waking you up.” It is a strikingly different tone from the campaign trail when Obama spoke in apocalyptic terms and told supporters: “Who you are [and] what you are does not change once you become president. It magnifies who you are.”
It also contrasts with the tone of the retiring Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, who continues to brand Trump a “sexual predator” who is fuelling hate crimes.
James Hohmann, a Washington Post columnist, argued that Obama “is just wallowing in a state of denial and has resorted to wishful thinking as a coping mechanism. It is a natural psychological condition that afflicts most human beings grieving a major loss, at least for a time. Presidents are not immune.”
But Frank Bruni, in the New York Times, contended that Obama was playing a pragmatist’s long game.
“It has to gall him,” Bruni wrote. “It definitely gives him incentive to use whatever psychological jujitsu necessary to nudge and manipulate Trump. He doesn’t want historians to write that he opened the door to a monster. So he’s pressing for a sunnier tale: the monster defanged, the nation safe and sound.”
The strategy appeared to be vindicated when, after their first meeting, Trump suddenly said he might retain some elements of Obama’s signature healthcare reforms. It remains to be seen if he will stick to his word.
Jon Meacham, a presidential biographer, said: “I think there are partisans who are probably grumpy about Obama’s grace in this but that puts pressure on him to act even more normal. I suspect part of the motivation here is to keep an open channel to Trump because Trump is an open book, unusually susceptible to the last person he spoke to.
“It’s in Obama’s interest to be able to offer advice in a congenial atmosphere and be on the end of the phone on some occasions. To be rude or standoffish would undercut any influence he might have going forward.”
‘I am rooting hard for you’
Some presidents have passed the baton with gritted teeth: John Adams did not attend Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration; Herbert Hoover and Franklin D Roosevelt were at loggerheads. But recent transitions have been cordial, Meacham said, although he recalled a “hiccup” when Jimmy Carter met Ronald Reagan and was disconcerted when Reagan did not take notes. Carter offered him a notebook but Reagan declined.
Reagan was followed by fellow Republican George H W Bush, the subject of Meacham’s most recent book. “There was a surprising bit of tension between the Reagan people and the Bush people in 1988-89,” he said. “An intraparty transfer was more complicated than one between parties. The Bush to [Bill] Clinton transition was, to some extent, more smoothly executed.”
Despite Bush’s bitter disappointment at his loss to Democrat Bill Clinton, he left a magnanimous handwritten letter in the Oval Office. “Your success is now our country’s success,” it said. “I am rooting hard for you.”
Clinton became close to both Bush and his son, George W, who now refers to him as his “brother from another mother”. Bush told Time magazine last year that when he and Clinton appear together in public, they are given a warm reception. “I think it lifts their spirits. Most people expect that a Republican and Democrat couldn’t possibly get along in this day and age.”
Trump, however, launched vitriolic attacks on both the Bush and Clinton dynasties and won. He will be the first president never to have held political or military office and seems the least likely member of what remains an old boys’ club. Obama, however, seems determined to invite him in and hope he will conform to its norms.
Bob Shrum, a Democratic consultant and strategist, said: “It’s a very unusual situation and he’s trying very hard to make it work as best he can. Trump is sui generis: we’ve never had anything like him. The president has been remarkably polite, uncritical, helpful and forthcoming, I think not for entirely disinterested reasons.
“Being rude would be a bad idea: why would Barack Obama let Trump’s bad behaviour reshape his behaviour?”
Shrum rejected the charge that Obama was inadvertently “normalising” his successor.
“Trump is the president-elect of the United States,” he said. “He’s the president-elect of the world. You have to deal with him in a serious way. If he takes office and proposes a lot of things that are wrong, chances are that Obama, at that point and others, will speak out.”
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