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Notes -
The Obama Factor
An interview with historian david garrow, who wrote a pulitzer prize winning biography of MLK and a biography of Obama several years ago. The central theme is how Obama created a fictional history and archetype for himself, exemplified in his own autobiography dreams from my father, which "is as much a work of dreamy literary fiction as it is an attempt to document Obama’s early life... Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself".
Garrow draws several comparisons between MLK and Obama as two of the most publicized black leaders of the last half century. MLK lived "two separate lives" in public and private - he had problems with alcohol and womanizing, and Garrow recently came under fire for publicizing fbi transcripts that claimed that MLK had stood by while one of his friends committed rape - and he "always believed that he was not essential, that he was accidental" in history, and understood that the media's image of him was a projection outside of himself. With Obama, "There’s an extent of intertwining, there’s an absence of keeping the two selves separate".
Garrow also talked to three of Obama's exes, which of course leads to some hilarious stories:
It's emphasized repeatedly how performatively Obama behaved, with impersonal love letters and a giant pile of journals which Obama showed to Garrow to tell him that he couldn't look at them: "He wants people to believe his story. For me to conclude that dreams from my father was historical fiction—oh god, did that infuriate him... The pose of being a writer is actually one that he prefers in many ways to being a politician". While rereading Obama's memoir, the author realizes that "This is clearly a highly wrought literary work of self-fashioning by a person who is in dialogue with literary sources. Or, to put it another way: I’m watching this guy make himself up."And from when he interviewed Ben Rhodes, one of Obama's top staffers, in 2016, "One of the things that Rhodes was at pains to get across to me was that Obama wrote all of his speeches himself. There was obviously a need or an instruction that had been given that Barack Obama was always to be presented as the author of Barack Obama. And by his instruction, the only book that the speechwriters were to consult was the collected speeches of Abraham Lincoln, because he was the only other president who deserved to be on the same shelf as Obama."
The author's conclusion is that "The best way to understand Barack Obama is that he is a literary creation of Barack Obama, the writer, who authored the novel of his own life and then proceeded to live out this fictional character that he created for himself on the page." they trace this back to Obama's upbringing as someone who was separated from his parents and was shuttled between indonesia and hawaii, contrasting it with MLK who "had the most privileged life a black person could have in america in those years" and a solid understanding of his own identity: "Doc [MLK] has no choice to be black. Barack chooses to be black."
I haven't read either Garrow's book or Obama's autobiography, but these guys make out Obama to be such a fascinating personality that I'll have to give them a read.
I remember when Rising Star was published being surprised so many people cared so much. I kind of expect all high level politicians to be narrative-obsessed, self-aggrandizing lizard people and that goes x10 for those who’ve climbed to the top of the pyramid.
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He calls the book "literary fiction" but doesn't make clear what's so fictitious about it beyond a he-said-she-said account of a breakup. If he presented a list of outright fabrications then I'd be all-ears, but he seems more inclined to imply the book was more fictitious in the sense that it misrepresented Barack Obama's personality, which, mais non! A self-serving political autobiography?! Obama's simply a dork with a huge ego, which honestly describes a lot of people.
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I wouldn't be surprised by this; Obama is not the traditionally black African-American (like his wife's family) and if he's ambitious to be in politics, he's smart enough to know he needs a good Origin Story that will get people to like him and vote for him. "I was born into privilege and never really suffered any setbacks" isn't a good story there. Michelle's family, being Chicago political royalty, got him into the nuts and bolts of the political process and taught him how to be 'one of us'.
Everybody in politics does this to an extent, because you're selling a product and the product is you. Obama is genuinely smart, so he clearly realised that the kind of narrative to get him places in the Democratic Party was a particular one, and he crafted that narrative. The way we've been told by PC or Social Justice or what you will that it is insulting or degrading to say that a minority is "articulate" and the likes, but that was a large part of his appeal to the white liberals: an articulate, presentable black man with an uplifting story of how he made it and at the same time a reassuring background of 'people like us' and not the grubby inner-city.
Ironically Michelle’s book seems to be a lot more popular.
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In the words of Joe Biden, "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."
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Fabricating a history and self is a rich presidential tradition: see Washington, FDR, JFK, LBJ, Lincoln, Clinton, Bush. It helps to have a fawning liberal press that covers up all your impoprieties (attending a church preaching "God Damn America," whipping your dick out for reporters, being crippled from polio). But it's not essential (when was the last time Bush did any ranching on his ranch?).
Obama, specifically, I think, represents a modern class fantasy of the college-educated intellectual. (It's not like being a constitutional scholar made his presidency notably more constitution-respecting.) This comes with a lot of baggage about the life of the tortured intellectual. He dabbled in drugs and homosexuality. He existed in a kind of tension with a minority subculture to which he didn't quite belong, but also provided him with a network and resources he used. He hobnobbed with the Ivy set that allows one to seamlessly move from a poor background to representing the upper class, with all the neuroses typical of that set. And he has an intellectual's weakness for speachifying. (Sorry all, I don't think hes an impressive speechmaker. For me, his speeches are like watching a magician when you can actually see how his hands are moving.)
There's a lot to be said here about how the press has always given Obama an easy time, and has let him coast on his easy image. (To this day a large part of the country still can't name any Obama scandals beyond "tan suit".) And I think that actually made Obama quite lazy -- he had a bad record of meeting with Senators and Congressmen to actually get anything done, and his signature accomplishment, Obamacare, rightfully has much more to do with Nancy Pelosi. After a certain point his presidency was dominated much more by his appointees in the cabinet. (Valerie Jarrett, Loretta Lynch, Ben Rhodes who famously bragged that reporters were too stupid to understand the Iran deal and how he'd created it.) And after leaving office Obama has been content to lazily curate his spotify playlist and put his name on a few Netflix adaptations. (He's not involved in anything especially charitable like Carter. Bush has probably done more to push back against Trump than Obama has.)
I think the right appraisal of Obama is still waiting on the death of a few distinct cults of worship.
The first is a liberal intelligentsia class that admires the Obama years as everything they like about politics. (Generally they are totally captivated by media hagiography and will actually ignore any of his shortcomings as a partisan Republican trick.)
The second is a sort of black folk worship that treats Obama as a hero for representing the race. You can go to nice middle class older black homes, the kind of person who has a curio cabinet well-dusted with lace, and they'll usually have a portrait of Obama somewhere. To these people Obama is almost a symbolic figure; any shortcomings he has are almost beside the point. (I rather respect this group because it is a totally consistent position.)
The third is really a cult of hatred -- the Republicans who elevated Obama into a sort of devil single-handedly ruining the country. (Look at how much more they resisted him than Biden.) Everything bad about the Obama years is ascribed to Obama himself. Now, I'm sure his IRS prosecuted conservatives and left-wing groups, Eric Holder enshrined equity in the ethos of DOJ investigations, spying on Fox News reporters, investigating the Trump campaign -- but very few of these actions ever actually have much to do with Obama himself. (Many of the worst excesses came from Hillary or Biden, or other factions who Obama united and represented after the 2007 primary, without ever really incorporating himself.)
There's an aloofness in there too -- Obama famously ran his campaign structure and fundraising outside the DNC, which left them in a historic deficit and gap in electing down-ballot candidates below the national level. Combined with his intellectual pretensions it is something like narcissism -- which, to be fair, you get from most presidents. (But if you call Obama a narcissist this codes as calling Obama a devil, and works up the people who consider Obama a hero, and then the race card enters the conversation, which, perhaps wisely, Obama rarely used himself. On that subject, he probably did benefit from some affirmative action, and a lot of the criticism he endured was of a sort his critics supposed wasn't racist but his defenders did, and maybe both sides were right. Probably Obama's own relationship to his race has something to do with what has been called "The Ordeal of Civility.")
To me Obama really isn't that interesting. He's something of a cipher and an empty shell. Richer presidential personalities are: Nixon, Johnson, and Trump. Hillary is much more interesting than Obama, which comes out in her pores. In that sense Obama ironically is like Lincoln.
We're all creating the character of "I", then playing that role, all the time. A few people achieve the levels of self-awareness to do so deliberately. Its more common in performers; David Bowie comes to mind. Modern business coaching is full of "defining your brand" etc.
All of this reminds me of Obama's book, which always came off as much more grandiose than the factual information it contained. Unlike most presidents (esp. the current one), Obama didn't have much of a history. He was fairly young and only served one term in the Senate. He had the chance to create a new character to present to the public, so he did.
I wasn't the only one to notice the somewhat odd tone of his book, which brings me to the point of this post.
“Obama had this habit of doing very grandiose, epic language, for day-to-day struggles or minor things that happened in his childhood,” says Warren. “And I realized: This is the language of an epic story, even though it’s not an epic story. There really is enough of that language to tell another story altogether.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/07/son-of-strelka-son-of-god-obama-narrates-a-new-creation-myth.html
Dan Warren chopped up the audio book version and used it to create an entirely different story: Son of Strelka, Son of God. The whole thing is on Youtube and linked in the above piece.
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I've wanted to remark for a while on the "tan suit" thing. I've been a pretty conventional conservative all through the Obama era. I'm not exactly glued to the media or anything, but I think I was following right wing media and forums around then pretty regularly. I still have no recollection of ever hearing about this tan suit thing from any conservative source at the time. I couldn't for the life of me name the year in which it happened.
I'm pretty sure I've only heard of it after the Obama era from Liberals trying to dunk on how lame criticism of Obama was. I tend to think they thought it sounded bad to claim Obama had no scandals, so they cherry picked the most ridiculous thing he was ever criticized on to make red team look bad, even though it was so tiny and insignificant in that world that nobody remembers it. Pretty good rhetorical tactic, I'll give them that.
Oh, thank God I'm not the only one. I thought everyone else knew about whatever it is 😁
So will anyone explain it, or do I have to Google it myself like some Stone Age caveperson?
Obama wore a tan suit at a press conference discussing ISIS and the Syria situation. Lou Dobbs and some GOP congressman made public comments about how it was "unpresidential" and not taking the matter seriously. The whole thing then became fodder for late night hosts to joke about for a week or so before everyone forgot about it.
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I personally thought murdering a 16 year old in a cafe was pretty bad but not nearly as an egregious as tan suits.
What are you referring to? Drone strikes? There are more egregious examples than that if you want to go there.
Anwar’s kid (ie an American citizen executed at a cafe)
Hearing that someone "killed an American citizen" under these circumstances is really an argument against birthright citizenship.
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This is not unusual for Texas elites; a ranch is more like a villa or a high end dacha than an actual working ranch and this is well understood by everyone reporting on it and most of the people who hear the reporting. Bush voters did not think his ranch produced anything, except maybe some game meat.
They purchased it shortly before he ran for president and moved to a house near Dallas after his presidency. The ranch aerved an important function when he was president, sure, so it's not as though it was only a campaign prop. But the conceit of Bush owning a ranch as part of his folksy, Texan heritage was a deliberate image he projected that was largely discarded once he didn't have a need for it. Now in his post-presidency he's much more free to pursue his interests independent of public image -- which turns out to be painting. (This was a late surprise to himself too I think, but definitely not in harmony with the image his campaign projected. Incidentally, and I love art so I don't want to look down on Bush for trying his hand at it -- I have seen his paintings, they had a large collection on display at the Truman Library in Missouri, and they might be the worst portraits I have ever seen in a professional gallery. They enter the uncanny valley, they're genuinely bad, several made me laugh out loud, and to the point that I actually felt a little embarrassed.)
Churchill liked painting as well, and I consider some of his watercolours the worst landscapes I've seen, so conservative politicans and amateur art don't seem that uncommon.
Grant, Eisenhower, Carter, and Bush all took up painting. I suppose when you've served as the most famous and powerful man in the world, art is a respite and source of solitude that has become unusually hard to come by.
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Hmph, looks like the left was right all along. (You know who else loved to paint but was really bad at it?...)
Was going to post this, but felt too low effort. Anyway I have to disagree, Hitlers painting of Neuschwanstein to appears to posses beauty, albeit one even the masses are capable of appreciating.
The true similarity between Adolf and George is inability to paint people.
Ah, having seen that I can now see why the director of the school of art recommended him to study architecture.
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Ouch!
It appears to, but when you look at it too much it's like every feature is drawn from a slightly different perspective -- I find it jarring, which is not the feeling you want to get from mass-appeal-beauty-type painting.
Ironically I think Hitler could have been quite successful as a cubist/modernist or something -- but of course he hated that stuff.
I confess I haven't seen Bush's art so can't comment -- is Hunter Biden any good?
A photo was taken from a nearby point and I can't see where mistakes are.
Googling the art of George Bush shows that he only paints portraits and I stand by my statement that he sucks at it. His painting of Putin is surpassed by works high schoolers.
More of a contemporary artist, but despite my distate for his style still better than oeuvre of Bush.
Look at the windows and buttresses -- none of them are individually wrong, but it's like they are all drawn from a slightly different viewpoint.
Unsettling.
If Hitler had moved to Paris after the war we would have one more interesting modern artist and one less homicidal dictator.
OK, that is pretty bad, lol.
ED: Damn I can't believe I missed the low effort joke --
Clearly Bush is EVEN WORSE than Hitler!
Huh, interesting -- I like his art-hoe look too!
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Constitutional scholarship rarely seems to make people more Constitution-respecting, instead enabling endless creative interpretations of Constitution. There is no damned way that some non-scholar, ill-informed on the variation penumbral emanations would be able to come up with Wickard out of the text that's actually in the Constitution, but I would not say that scholarly learning resulted in that ruling respecting the Constitution more than some idiot with a copy of it in their hand would.
This happens when you over-intellectualise anything. Art, literature, architecture, religion, computer science. We lost a lot when these became university subjects instead of crafts.
(It’s still useful to have some deep intellectualisers of these things around, because they know more and shake things up, but in my opinion they work better when you put them in a team of different backgrounds. I’ve found that if you have too many computer scientists on a project then you get lots of arguments and something very complex that doesn’t quite fit requirements.)
Religion is literally the original university subject. You seem to be objecting to the academy in general, for all time, rather than over-intellectualization (something for which religion has a history stretching back 1500 beyond the origin of universities).
I have spent a considerable time in the academy. My point - perhaps poorly phrased - were that it’s easy to to try and go deep into a subject and end up going straight through. It’s also the case that academia rewards originality and in many areas academics used up all the reasonable analyses long ago and now compete to champion unreasonable ones. They also just plain get bored.
I’ve met few academic theologians but I liked the ones I met. I would still be more inclined to expect wacky stuff from the academy than a village church. Perhaps I’m wrong.
This is a more reasonable criticism. It's less over-intellectualization and more over-professionalization.
But the profession is intellectual so they go together rather :P I don’t think it’s linked inherently to professionalism, though, since you get the same dynamics without money in, say, the Bloomsbury set. If you spend too much time thinking about something then it’s natural for boredom with the usual to set in and status to start accumulating to wild or novel takes.
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He dabbled in homosexuality? Is that in the link?
Edit: Checking I found these two references-
"Yet when it came out six years ago, Rising Star was mostly ignored; as a result, its most scandalous and perhaps revelatory passages, such as Obama’s long letter to another girlfriend about his fantasies of having sex with men, read today, to people who are more familiar with the Obama myth than the historical record, like partisan bigotry."
"With Alex [McNear, Obama’s girlfriend at Occidental College], I think she wanted to have her role known. So when Alex showed me the letters from Barack, she redacted one paragraph in one of them and just said, “It’s about homosexuality.”"
If its just one paragraph out of a letter doesn't to an ex, doesn't look like evidence for 'dabbling.'
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There has been a lot of gossip for years about Obama with potential gay lovers or escapades in his history. Most of them have not passed unicorn tabloid levels of credibility, but there's a certain plausibility there, in the sense that it's plausible if you want to believe it and implausible if you don't. But yes, the source above finally claims to have uncovered some harder proof than the he-said-he-said hush-hush rumormongering that's come before.
It has to be said of Obama that his personal history is pretty squeaky-clean, and he's not prone to the personal scandals of other presidents. No prostitutes and hookers, Stormy Daniels, Monica, drinking, drugs, bad parties, bad reputation. He definitely smoked some pot in college and quite possibly dabbled in heavier stuff, but, most likely, he never got up to anything anyone would really care about anymore. It's always possible that he has some skeletons deep in the closet (and with the fawning media abeyance it's possible his closet is much deeper than it appears). But Obama has always been a boring cipher around whom much more controversial personalities affiliate. (Hell, one of his mentors was Bill Ayers, who lead a literal terrorist bombing campaign in the 70s, and this issue has been so effectively framed that bringing it up makes one sound like a right-wing crackpot and not a serious talker.)
There are three things that make it at least plausible: he doesn’t seem, to my eyes very affectionate to Michelle Obama, he has zero sex scandals in his past, and these rumors has been around for a while.
As far as Barack and Michelle, I just don’t recall him ever being affectionate. They don’t hold hands, they don’t kiss in public (or at least nothing more than a perfunctory peck. He doesn’t seem to ever put his arm around her or help her through doorways. In fact, if you see them together, you only click them as a couple because you’ve been told they are. And that’s pretty indicative to me that their marriage is much more an arrangement than a romance. That might just be that she wants power. Who knows.
Second, the fact that the single most powerful person on the planet has no sex scandals at all actually is pretty weird. He’s surrounded by people who have a lot to gain by making him happy, an intern working for the president is making her career and would be at least strongly incentivized to go along. Bill Clinton could get interns to do sex acts as governor of a podunk state that has nothing special about it. Obama was much more powerful. The fact that he’s never had something like that ever seems a bit odd.
Finally, these rumors have, as far as I know, been pretty steady. The first being an ex girlfriend from the 1970s, but it’s not exactly going away either. And usually in scandals, if you find multiple people saying the same things over time, they tend to be true.
This argument runs counter to the internet conspiracy that Michelle is / was a man and their children are not their natural children.
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Would it even be a scandal though?
"The first Black president is also the first Bi president" sounds like more of a Pride Month headline than a scandalous one to me.
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Gosh durn it, I don't like speculating about the sex lives of politicians, but I wonder if that "I think I might be gay or at least bi" wasn't the male version of college-age women dabbling in being lesbian? In order to make themselves more interesting than plain vanilla whitebread (if you excuse that in this context) conventional personality?
It's a great way of faking sincerity: oh, I feel so comfortable with you I can access my emotional side and talk about my deepest fantasies. All in the service of getting into someone's pants, which if they were dating at the time, seems to have worked. He started college at the very end of the 70s so there might have been some of that 70s sexual liberation politics still going around then, where being not-a-plain boring straight-guy gives you added value in the dating market.
I have to agree with the above, that if there was any ex-boyfriend (even of the drunken college boys messing around variety), we'd have heard of it by now, they'd have rushed to the media to peddle their story. So all confined to fantasies, that he's writing in letters to his girlfriend, and may not even be real fantasies, just something he made up to pique her interest.
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I didn't realize pretending to be hetero-queer to get college-educated pussy was such an old tradition.
All the nice girls like a sailor! 😁
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I think Obama is definitely a fascinating personality. The comparison (and contrast) with MLK is interesting, because as you say Obama isn’t really affiliated with African American identity at all until he decided to enter politics in his mid-20s, whereas MLK was born into the (at the time tiny) comfortable black middle class but nevertheless seemingly interacted through his father’s ministry with a much larger cross section of African American society.
It is unfair to claim that Obama is always very defensive about his fabricated identity, though. He’s quite open in his autobiographies about how he made and remade himself multiple times, sometimes to fit in with white or Asian peers, sometimes to
get BPD arthoe pussyattempt to make girls interested in him, sometimes to assimilate more into the black American community. His passages on his arrival in Chicago in Dreams From My Father actually often seem to drip with contempt for the young black men he encounters on ‘ghetto street corners’ whom he regards as living out a delusional fantasy of being men, unable or unwilling to improve the condition of their communities. Of course, he was a master of flowery language and nobody seemed to actually read the book (even though they bought it in great numbers), so this remains barely discussed.So Barry is absolutely a pseud who fancies himself a great intellectual and writer (and this was always the story from eg. his peers on the Harvard Law Review and so on), but he’s admitted this so many times (in fact I believe he openly calls himself a pseudo intellectual on several occasions) that it’s hard to call this substantially dishonest. I mean, this is a guy who would write his girlfriend letters like:
…the guy is clearly such a dork, it’s hard not to be a little sympathetic. His softboi letters about thinking he might be bisexual are obviously in the same vein. Is he a liar? Certainly. Did he invent a fictional life for himself and then live it all the way to the White House? Absolutely. But his messianic complex is so autistic and slightly embarrassing that one can’t help but be slightly charmed by him, I think. We’re all LARPing our lives to some degree, at least if you believe The Last Psychiatrist.
I think he’s exactly the kind of liar I think are the most annoying. Yes, pretty much everyone in politics has a sort of fictional biography. My issue with this sort of thing is that it’s absolutely fluid on every dimension of his life, and there’s no “core self” that doesn’t change just because his current audience doesn’t like that he’s like that. To blacks, he becomes black like them, at least until it becomes a liability, then those Black people become “ghetto losers” who aren’t real men because they aren’t like his vision of what an acceptable Black person should be (which is dependent on the mostly white politicians he hangs around who want blacks to be activists and democrats). When the church he was attending was outed as the “God damn America” church, he didn’t actually defend it as something he personally believed in as a message. He sort of implied that it doesn’t mean that, and went elsewhere, and was never seen in public with that preacher again. He was intellectual until it became a problem at which point he tried to pretend he’s down to earth.
I don’t agree with Trump, but one thing I loved about him apart from all that was that he wasn’t changing everything about him to pander to whoever he was talking to or wanted to appeal to. He was upfront about what he was about. He’s on tape saying “grab them by the pussy” and he didn’t walk it back or pretend it didn’t happen or recontextualize it as not meaning what it sounded like. He said a lot of guys talk like that in locker rooms. Trump never really pretends to be anything other than Trump, a rich guy who is just going to do whatever he wants. He’s been the same trashy New York rich guy he was back when he was selling Trump steaks mail order in the 1980s. He might be overstating his business acumen, but there’s at least a core part of who he is that like it or not, you can know that he’s not going to disown his past or his stated opinions.
Trump lies constantly. The fresh, relieving thing about him is that he never tries to make his lies believable: If you like him, you'll believe him (or at least ignore the lie), if you don't like him, you won't. He lets you decide if you're going to be taken in by him, while a lot of other politicians seem to actually care if you're being fooled.
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He hosted a reality TV show. His entire public personality is designed around what gets attention. He just has a different - cruder, more humorous, more blatantly pandering - approach to politics than almost everyone else, which his fans love and you notice. Which, sure, is funny, a breath of fresh air from the stale polite pandering, but "genuine" it isn't. Not that other politicians are more genuine. (this is orthogonal to whether his politics are good or bad)
What’s the evidence for this being a persona rather than a rare and useful personality?
He shut up about the vaccines eventually but never went anti-vax and based on all the leaks from people who worked with him he’s pretty much the same behind closed doors as in public.
His affectations (this might be his ‘personality’ depending on definition) are longstanding, it’s his opinions that change with his audience. But the same was true of Obama, just in a less crude way.
All you've provided evidence for is that he doesn't emphasize those opinions of his that his audience doesn't like, not that he changes his opinions with his audience.
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I suppose. I’m hesitant about this line of reasoning - like many mottizens my opinions from, say, the Blair era would be unrecognisable compared to now. But there’s a natural progression based on the course of events and my own personal history.
Going back to the original point:
I think that Trump really is built differently from other politicians. People see it and react well to it. Trump (who is a human being and likes to be liked plus pretty narcissistic) grows closer in inclination to the people who love him and away from the people who hate him. I don’t think it’s cynical pandering or that there’s a kayfabe he could break, it’s just natural evolution.
Of course, if that relation breaks down Trump is likely to react badly and you might see a large change in inclination then but I would again consider that genuine for all intents and purposes.
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I'd say - he isn't faking his 'say whatever I want to, do whatever I feel like' attitude and approach, that is real, as his ballooning legal issues demonstrate. At the same time, he is intentionally crafting his many affectations, phrases, statements, political positions, and vibe to get support in a way that isn't 'genuine' like OP implies.
It's sure a long con then -- he seems not much different than in his 80s interviews to me; kind of an impressive lack of personal growth there tbh.
You mean his TV interviews while he was aggressively building up a public persona for himself in New York?
The core of my argument is saying he's a politician and entertainer. He tries out nicknames, tries policies, positions. I don't think this is unusual or particularly immoral, I just don't think you can become President or a reality TV cohost off of the natural strength of your character without designing your approach to the audience.
Just that he's been pretty consistent in his choices for a long time -- I think the persona is more "what Trump thinks is cool" than "what Trump thinks voters/viewers think is cool" -- which at least is, like, an ideology, man.
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I can’t prove otherwise, though would be interested to see some evidence that his affectations etc. used to be significantly different (as opposed to just developing or being less hidden.)
The main reason I’m sceptical is that if he just wanted money and power and respect (really, don’t we all?) I don’t see what he gets out of making himself the figurehead of a despised and weak ideology.
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I think Trump absolutely flip flops to cater to his audience. He did it many times in 2015/2016, and certainly has done since he left office.
One great example is Covid vaccines, which he personally endorsed, encouraged, and took (with a photo op) and was extremely proud of. Then in 2021, he gets booed multiple times at rallies, first for encouraging followers to get vaccinated and then even for saying he got the booster vaccine. And now he barely mentions it again. (I expect he might in the presidential debates v Biden, but not in the primary campaign). He actually was asked about this (iirc by Fox News) recently and he just kind of shrugs and says “well, I don’t even know if they work actually” or something. This for what he considered his greatest or one of his greatest achievements in office.
Trump is a master at telling people what they want to hear. His views on abortion, on religion, on trans issues have all changed as the base has changed. On immigration and trade he’s been consistent for a while, he does have some longstanding political beliefs, but on many other issues he moves with and caters to his audience, part of what makes him a great politician (when it comes to getting elected, at least).
I think Obama’s core political value - and David Samuels does kind of notes this in the linked article - is a generic center-left Euro style hostility to American exceptionalism. I don’t think he’s a radical, or a hardcore third-worldist or anything, and I think he rationally sees that as stupid and performative on the part of wealthy westerners. But he doesn’t believe America is a special place, or a special opportunity, the way that even many radical leftists in the American tradition did. And he thinks that it’s a little stupid, a little plebeian, to engage in that kind of rhetoric. He’s a pure elitist, in a way, but he’s not quite smart enough to be a true intellectual. He’s most similar to the archetypal /r/atheism poster back in the day, or to the annoying kid who always raises his hand in class to lecture the teacher, which is what he apparently was.
He had a quest for power and then wealth, but it wasn’t really to be remembered as a great statesman or to implement a particular political program or even to just have power, it was to be the wise man in the corner of the party surrounded by devoted adherents. That’s genuinely what motivates him, he wants to be an intellectual.
I don't think this is evidence of Trump "flip-flopping" so much as the fact that Omicron is objectively far less lethal than previous strains of Covid and that society seems to have largely moved on from Covid - bringing it up is yesterday's battle.
Exactly. The 5 people left who still care about COVID are also likely fervently blue tribe so it is completely pointless for Trump to try and appeal to them.
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Can you learn to use the shift key?
I see plenty of capital letters, mostly in the right places. Just a few missed capitalizations. So it's not like the post was written in some sort of obnoxious text-speak, and this complaint just reads as low effort petty sniping.
I honestly mean my complaint. Seriously, capitalize the first words of sentences as is the norm.
But looking at the comment now it looks fine. I wouldn't have complained about it as is. I think they edited it from a state of no capitalization to typical capitalization. I recall no initial words of sentences being capitalized.
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