How Trump crushed Obama’s legacy The president-elect rides the cowboy spirit

At 78, Trump’s remorseless pitchman’s energy is at once diminished, and at the same more genial. And no wonder. Since his loss, in 2020, when he claimed that the election was stolen from him — and his opponents claimed that he tried to seize power through illegal means — Trump had been subjected to a whole-of-society assault by the American elite that would have killed most men 20 years younger, including those who don’t eat cheeseburgers most days for lunch. After 116 indictments, an armed raid on his home, the jailing of his business associates, and the looming threat of bankruptcy, followed by two and even three in-person rallies a day for the better part of a year, which led to him being shot in the head by a would-be assassin, the fact that Trump is still standing upright, let alone greeting a crowd as President-elect, is clearly a miracle – the biggest miracle since the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I can hear Trump saying. Now, he is about to speak. The TV above the bar remains silent.

“Honey, have you ever been in a bar before?” the bartender is asking me. For the past 10 minutes or so, we’ve been politely going back and forth about whether she can turn up the volume on the bar’s television set. All I can hear around me as Trump starts to speak is the noise of a late Tuesday night at the Wagon Wheel.

Sure, I’ve been in plenty of bars before, I answer. “Well, then you know that politics is a subject that men get angry over, and I don’t want that in my bar,” the waitress answers matter-of-factly. “You can read the captions on the TV.”

As sensible as her precautions might seem, there’s an undertone to her replies that reminds me that I am in a town, and not in the countryside. Even out here in the West, in a solid red state that epitomises cowboy culture, it is the divide between urban and exurban places, not the division between so-called red and blue states, that is culturally defining. People living in Brooklyn Heights, or in Austin, Texas or in Missoula, Montana or in Grand Rapids, Iowa, all tend to have more in common with each other than they do with people living even a mere 20 miles away.

“For fuck’s sake, this is history,” I suggest, as I watch Trump’s lips moving. “It’s not politics. Everyone can all put their prejudices aside for five minutes s and hear the man.” She purses her lips, and signals it’s a no-go. Then she offers me a free seltzer.

“We must protect our geniuses, protect our super-geniuses”, the caption-writer translates, as Trump’s lips form grandiloquent and hilarious phrases introducing Elon Musk and his love for rockets. “We have so few of them.”

Trump is clearly one. He’s an American genius, an original of a type that began with P.T. Barnum, and also includes Elon Musk. But neither Barnum nor Musk could ever become President twice, and defeat the entire American power structure. I wish to God I could hear him speak. After overcoming 100+ indictments, and having his X account revoked, the man deserves to have his moment here, in this bar.

I don’t need to hear Trump’s stunned-looking critics in the Party commentariat speak, though. The expressions on their pallid faces say it all. They are reckoning with the extent of their loss, which is turn related to their collective sense of self-importance — which is belied both by tonight’s result and by their viewership numbers. Having cratered public trust in their profession over the past decade by routinely lying to their audience on behalf of the government, which they identified in turn with the Democratic Party, the country’s self-identified defenders of democracy can fume all they want about Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist, Hitlerian leanings. The rest of America is as deaf to their blather as I am.

Praising Elon Musk, the country’s most successful technologist, Trump looks more like an avuncular Caribbean vacation package or waterbed salesman than a would-be Hitler. Meanwhile, party hacks like Joy Reid and the political consultants turned “commentators” like David Axelrod, along with supposed “straight news” types like Jake Tapper of CNN, who had all long ago become indistinguishable from each other, by virtue of drinking the Party Kool-Aid are waving their hands at the cameras like they were calling for smelling salts. But once lost, the trust of an audience is hard to win back.

Trump has also lost a step or two himself. His speeches, once gorgeous arias of invective, innuendo and insult comedy, delivered with the snappy timing of a Vegas Rat Pack headliner, have been transformed into rambling arabesques, like the musings of a slightly dotty family patriarch at the Thanksgiving table. Let us bow our heads, while Loopy Uncle Donald tells us about the deal he made with a Saudi Prince on a golf course. Then everyone can eat more pumpkin pie.

Trump had also learned a trick or two along the way, though. He graciously shares the stage, and allows the importance and accomplishments of others to validate his own role as MC. His timing clearly couldn’t have been better. Five years of Covid laws, a stagnant economy, direct and indirect government censorship of social media, official lying and gaslighting on every subject from trans surgeries to the efficacy of masking to the startling numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country to the spectacle of a dottering Joe Biden being barely able to remember his own name, had left most of the country dispirited and ready for change.

As the evening ends, Trump and the political movement he founded will likely control not just the White House but also the Senate, the House, and also the Supreme Court, giving Trump an actual, real-world chance to fulfill his mandate to Make America Great Again. Even though, after a decade of near-constant repetition of the slogan by adherents and detractors, no one can say with any real certainty what it now means.

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As it turns out, the American people are still allowed to vote, regardless of whether their betters decry their choices as racist, sexist, short-sighted, and above all anti-democratic. It’s a paradox that the country’s genius-level elites routinely fail to acknowledge, because they are all profoundly in agreement. We must protect our democracy from those evil anti-democratic forces, American voters, who vote for Donald Trump against the expert guidance of their betters, meaning us.

Meanwhile, the lurching of an increasingly overbearing and at the same time increasingly anarchic and incompetent American state had managed to alarm many Americans who were previously more alarmed by Trump. Over the past weeks, they have been turning out in larger numbers than anyone had imagined — defying the expressed preferences and instructions of the American’ elite’s chief tutelary figure, Barack Obama, who had campaigned very publicly and hard for Kamala Harris, often overshadowing the candidate herself. Obama’s role in the Harris campaign was truthfully less strange than the fact that the former President somehow remained in Washington after his time in the White House was over, instead taking meetings in his Kalorama mansion, which is hardly the most valuable entry in his bulging portfolio of luxury properties — which also includes high Gilded Age mansions in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. But it was surely the most important, serving as the centre of his unprecedented Shadow Presidency.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist from Haiti as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism.

Yet Americans, of all races and creeds, felt themselves to be living in a dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland, controlled by an unseen hand — and they didn’t like it. If the elite pollsters and expert predictors who had failed to foresee a Trump win had familiarised themselves with American history, instead of parroting the talking points of Obama and his operatives, they would have seen a country eager for a renewal of the freedoms that the vast majority of Americans embrace as their birthright.

Seeing Americans as one people, with a common culture and character, shaped by a common history, is not something that America’s new elites know how to do, though. From kindergarten on, they are taught otherwise. Ivy League universities, the crucible in which the new class has been forged, base admissions and hiring decisions not on measures of objective performance, but on their ranking in the ever-shifting hierarchies of Party-sanctioned identity groups. The ability to sort Americans into bureaucratic categories like BIPOC, MENA, LGBTQ+ and other alphabet soup constructions is in fact the defining skill of Obama-era elites. It signifies mastery of in-group codes that help the Democratic Party manage its own top-down constituencies, which are regimented by political operatives and NGO organisers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations, executive orders, census categories and other legally-binding schemes meant to overcome historical American notions of equality. That’s how the party machine operates.

Now, in one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to run the country, including the prestige institutions and the media, through a combination of bureaucratic capture and social pressure, accentuated by control of large tech platforms, was finally melting down. No wonder the press was in shock. None of the lines that they had been given could be reconciled with the numbers onscreen.

A reckoning will surely come. At the very least, the time has now arrived for Barack Obama to leave Washington and exit American politics, now that his Shadow Presidency — which proved to be even more counter-productive and chaotic than Trump’s first term in office — has gone down in flames.

Meanwhile, the gap between what America’s elites believe, and what the rest of the country believes, has never been wider, probably not since the late 19th century. Back then, Gilded Age America was ruled by a tight group of tycoons and their retainers who positioned themselves as the heirs to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the President and the General who together led the Civil War. The further the Republican Party traveled from the Civil War, the more the busts of Lincoln and Grant resembled window-dressing for the extraordinary fortunes of a new oligarchy that traveled in private trains, summered in Newport, and bought every available Old Master painting in Europe to decorate their lavish houses. Economically and morally, the so-called Robber Barons — Morgans, Rockefellers, Goulds, Fricks, Carnegies, Whitneys, Harrimans — had an easy time of it, enjoying the benefits of cheap immigrant labour while flattering themselves as the rightful heirs of the Party that ended slavery. With the exception of Carnegie, a self-made Scotsman and innovative industrialist who gave away his fortune to establish America’s system of public libraries, history doesn’t remember them kindly.

The Democratic Party that Bill and Hillary Clinton built in the Nineties, and Barack Obama then took in a decidedly more radical direction after 2012, won’t be remembered kindly by Americans either. The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the country’s greatest political leader during what became known as the American Century. Roosevelt kept the country going during the Great Depression, and set it on the path to victory in the Second World War while creating a social safety net for the poor. Remarkably, every American President up until Bill Clinton in 1992 was either a protegee of Roosevelt or at least a private in his army.

The political alliance between urban ethnic machine politicians, including black urban political leaders, and Southern whites that FDR led also undercut the power of the Wasp class, successors to the New England Puritans, who dominated America’s class system and the country’s economy following the Civil War. By curbing their cultural, political, and economic influence, Roosevelt made possible the rise of the American middle class, which made America great, and also more equal.

The Clintons’ embrace of Wall Street and of international trade treaties was the window through which America’s old elites — rooted both in the Northeast as well as in San Francisco — climbed back into history. The China trade flourished, as did Democratic Party’s new Wall Street clients — at the expense of the Party’s traditional working-and-middle class constituencies. Obama brought Silicon Valley’s formerly libertarian-oriented founders on board the gravy train by promising them protection from populists like Bernie Sanders and from his own crew of high-end Chicago shakedown artists. In return, they would pay taxes to the party through campaign and NGO contributions and DEI hiring. Through this new political wiring, Obama completed the transformation of FDR’s Democrats into Gilded Age Republicans.

It will be hard for Donald Trump to top that. But maybe he will. Maybe Elon Musk will entirely revamp the Federal government. Maybe he will actually colonise Mars. Meanwhile, if Trump understands one thing, it’s that America is not Europe, or Asia, or Iraq, or Brazil. American elites come and go, while the capacity for sudden, radical, wide-eyed self-invention and leaps of innovation remain the country’s defining trait.

What outsiders tend to miss is that America was never meant to be stable. It is and has always been an inferno, the epitome of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. The wonder and freedom and heartbreak of American life is that, sooner or later, everything is consumed in the furnace. For all his wealth and success, Elon Musk’s children may worship other gods. His grandchildren may end up in a trailer park, smoking meth. McKinsey consultants with Harvard degrees may wind up unemployed or selling bottled war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most eminent environmental lawyer and the closest thing the Democratic Party has to royalty, may become an antivaccine heretic, be broadly mocked and humiliated by the elite and by the less imaginative members of his own family, run for President, endorse Donald Trump, take on the Big Pharma and Big Ag, and Make America Healthy Again. Or not. All anyone can say for sure is that attempts to game the American system are doomed to failure.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.