by Kylie Handler, editor
According to a new memoir by one of President Barack Obama’s former adviser’s, the former president felt that Americans wanted a “cartoon” for their commander in chief after President Donald Trump took home an election win.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser wrote about the former president’s worries in his upcoming memoir titled “The World As It Is.”
Upset over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s failure to win the election, Obama asked his aides riding with him on an armored limousine, “What if we were wrong?”
After reading a column that claimed liberals had forgotten the importance of identity and that many Americans felt left behind by the idea promoted that everyone belongs to a single community of people, Obama reportedly became distraught.
“Maybe we pushed too far,” Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”
Rhodes explains that Obama was reassured by his aides that if he had the ability to run for a third term, he would have won it with ease. But, Obama was not convinced.
“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.
Only a day after the election, Obama seemed to pep up a bit and reportedly sent Rhodes a message saying, “There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.”
But, his positivity did not last long.
Only days later Obama was quoted as saying, “Maybe this is what people want. I’ve got the economy set up well for him. No facts. No consequences. They can just have a cartoon.”
He added that, “We’re about to find out just how resilient our institutions are, at home and around the world.”
Apparently, the idea that Trump could unravel Obama’s legacy really took a toll on the former president.
“I feel like Michael Corleone,” Obama reportedly said, referencing “The Godfather” character as he prepared to hand over the White House to Trump. “I almost got out.”
A new HBO documentary recording on election night in 2016 shows Rhodes himself sitting outside on a curb repeating that Trump’s victory was hard to “process.”
This video of a shell-shocked Ben Rhodes after Hillary's election loss taken from a new HBO documentary is incredible. pic.twitter.com/EnJllQ5rBX
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) May 30, 2018
In his new memoir though, Rhodes explains that he should have seen that result coming.
“I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have seen it coming,” he writes. “Because when you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we’d run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used: She’s part of a corrupt establishment that can’t be trusted to bring change.”
–Kylie Handler is a news editor for The Horn News