Speaking on his CNN show on Saturday, following Trump’s attempt to roll back the Iran deal, Don Lemon asked the question: “Does President Trump have an Obama obsession?” and suggesting the Republican was “making it his mission to undo every last bit of the Obama legacy.”
Political analyst David Gergen told Lemon he believed the recent announcement on the Iran deal, as well as Trump killing Obamacare subsidies, was “more about blowing up the former president’s legacy than anybody wants to admit.”
“Anything which has the name Obama on it automatically becomes a target for Donald Trump and he’s trying to reverse as much of that as possible,” he added, warning that the tendency of presidents to reverse domestic policy set by their predecessors was now rolling into foreign policy.
Indeed, back in August, a European diplomat reportedly told BuzzFeed anonymously that in his dealings with President Trump, he had noticed the Republican was driven more by a desire to scrap Obama’s policies than to enact his own.
“It’s his only real position,” the diplomat told BuzzFeed. “He will ask: ‘Did Obama approve this?’ And if the answer is affirmative, he will say: ‘We don’t.’ He won’t even want to listen to the arguments or have a debate. He is obsessed with Obama.”
This is by no means a new observation, people have been talking about it almost since Trump took office. However it is interesting that now even reputable news magazines are coming to that consensus.
Former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod thinks he understands why Trump has this obsession.
Courtesy of The Hill:
"There’s some other thing at play here that I don’t have the qualifications to analyze that clearly motivates him," Axelrod said in an interview on CNN's "Smerconish" Saturday.
"Because every time he talks about anything that President Obama did, he talks about it in these very caustic terms as if he’s jealous or envious of the esteem with which Obama left office.”
Axelrod added that Trump is "motivated" by the desire to "obliterate the Obama legacy."
That makes pretty good sense actually.
President Obama was a particularly gifted leader who seemed to handle the day to day problems that cropped up with relative ease and a quiet dignity.
I will always believe that Donald Trump has been obsessed with Obama probably almost since he took office in 2008, and then it was during that fateful White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011 that Trump decided he wanted to destroy him, and his legacy, forever.
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