Obama, Barack

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    Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value. The World Will Notice.

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    In the late 1980s, Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist who died this month, developed the concept of “soft power.” His central premise, that the United States enhances its global influence by promoting values like human rights and democracy, has guided U.S. foreign policy for decades across both Republican and Democratic administrations.Donald Trump has made clear that he fundamentally rejects this vision. As president, he has ordered a sweeping overhaul of the State Department that will cripple its capacity to promote American values abroad. At the center of this effort are drastic cuts to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — the State Department’s core institution for advancing soft power, which I led under President Barack Obama. Unless Congress intervenes, the debasement of the bureau’s role will impair America’s ability to challenge authoritarianism, support democratic movements and provide independent analysis to inform U.S. foreign policy. The long-term result will be a United States that is weaker, less principled and increasingly sidelined as authoritarian powers like Russia and China offer their own transactional models of global engagement.The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor was created with bipartisan congressional support in 1977, a time when lawmakers sought greater influence over foreign policy in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and America’s support for authoritarian regimes in countries like Chile and South Korea. President Jimmy Carter’s religious convictions and deep commitment to human rights gave the fledgling bureau early momentum. Still, its purpose was always practical: to ensure U.S. foreign aid and trade decisions were informed by credible assessments of human rights conditions around the world. That’s why every year, the bureau prepares congressionally mandated human rights reports.In its early years, it struggled to defend its existence. Foreign governments resented being called out in its annual reports and attacked its legitimacy. Many State Department traditionalists viewed its focus on human rights as an unhelpful distraction from the realpolitik topics they were much more comfortable addressing. It also drew criticisms of hypocrisy, mostly from the left, for condemning the records of other countries in the face of unresolved human rights problems here in the United States. Others accurately pointed out that even as the State Department’s human rights reports documented serious abuses, the United States continued to provide substantial aid to governments like Ferdinand E. Marcos’s Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and numerous military regimes across Latin America.These tensions have not disappeared. But over nearly five decades, the bureau has evolved to confront them. Governments, companies, judges and nongovernmental organizations have all come to rely on its annual country reports. It plays the lead role in preventing the United States from funding foreign security forces that violate human rights. And its policy engagement has guided the U.S. approach to international conflicts, repressive regimes and civil wars.That progress is now at risk. The Trump administration’s proposed “reforms” will hamstring my former agency’s capacity to uphold its mission in three major ways.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Tragedy of Joe Biden

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      The denouement of Joe Biden is unbearably sad.The Irishman who could spend 45 minutes answering one question lost his gift of gab. The father who saw two of his children die and two spin into addiction wilted under the ongoing stress, especially when Hunter Biden — “my only living son,” as Joe called him — got tangled in the legal system.The gregarious pol, who loved chatting up lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, ended up barricaded in his Rehoboth, Del., house with Covid, furious at everyone, proclaiming his oldest friends disloyal naysayers. He was fuming at nearly everyone except Jill, Hunter and the cordon sanitaire of aides who had fueled his delusions that he could be re-elected despite his feeble and often incoherent state at 81.And, saddest of all, the man known for his decency, empathy, humility and patriotic spirit was poisoned by power, losing the ability to see that, in clinging to his office, he was hurting the party and country he had served for over half a century. And hurting himself, ensuring a shellacking in the history books.It is the oldest story in tragedy: hubris.If presidents get reduced to their essence, Joe Biden’s is a chip on his shoulder.He did not want to hear from former President Barack Obama that he should pass the torch to someone younger, so Obama tried to work obliquely through others to ease him out. Biden saw Obama as the one who pushed him aside in 2015 for Hillary Clinton, a fellow member of the elite world of Ivy Leaguers, a world Biden always felt was sniffy toward him.Obama gave Biden a consolation prize in 2017, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, when Joe wanted a different piece of metal: Excalibur. Biden’s chip grew larger.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      White House Swaps Obama Portrait With One of Trump From Assassination Attempt

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      The Trump administration said on Friday that it had moved a portrait of former President Barack Obama in a White House hallway and replaced it with a pop-art painting of President Trump pumping his fist after the assassination attempt last year on the campaign trail in Butler, Pa.The shuffling of décor is not uncommon at the White House, where portraits are rotated often. But the new, striking artwork depicting Mr. Trump drew criticism from some presidential historians, who could not recall another president hanging a painting of himself during his term in the White House.Typically, paintings of presidents and first ladies are hung in the White House after they have left office, historians said.A spokesman for Mr. Obama declined to comment.The portrait of Mr. Obama, which was unveiled in the East Room during the administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., shows the former president in a dark suit and silver tie, standing with his hands in his pockets. The background is white; the portrait was based on photographs taken by the artist Robert McCurdy.The new painting shows Mr. Trump embraced by a team of Secret Service agents as an American flag billows in a cloudless blue sky behind him. Streaks of red run across his face.In a post on social media, the White House announced the new portrait of President Trump.The White House, via XWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Obama Calls for Universities to Stand Up to Trump Administration Threats

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      Former President Barack Obama urged universities to resist attacks from the federal government that violate their academic freedom in a campus speech on Thursday.He also said schools and students should engage in self-reflection about speech environments on their campuses.“If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right?,” he said during a conversation at Hamilton College in upstate New York. “Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?”“If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.”Mr. Obama’s comments came as the Trump administration has threatened universities with major cuts. It took away $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University in March. It later suspended $175 million to the University of Pennsylvania, and said this week that it was reviewing about $9 billion in arrangements with Harvard and its affiliates.At Harvard, where the university has made efforts to respond to Republican criticism and concerns from Jewish students and faculty, more than 800 faculty members have signed a letter urging their leadership to more forcefully resist the administration and defend higher education more broadly. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In First Post-Election Speech, Obama Calls for ‘Forging Alliances and Building Coalitions’

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      “Purity tests are not a recipe for long-term success,” the former president said in the speech in Chicago.In his first speech since the presidential election in November, Barack Obama urged Americans who want democracy to survive to look for ways to compromise, engage with the other side, turn away from identity politics and build relationships with unlikely potential allies.“Pluralism is not about holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya,’” Mr. Obama said in Chicago on Thursday. “It is not about abandoning your convictions and folding when things get tough. It is about recognizing that, in a democracy, power comes from forging alliances and building coalitions, and making room in those coalitions not only for the woke, but the waking.”He added: “Purity tests are not a recipe for long-term success.”Billed as an address on “the power of pluralism,” the speech — a road map of sorts for political survival for liberals in a second term for Donald J. Trump — was delivered before hundreds of people as part of an annual Democracy Forum put on by the Obama Foundation, a private nonprofit entity that is led by Mr. Obama.Mr. Obama opened the speech with an acknowledgment that when he told friends of the focus of this year’s forum, the topic drew groans and eye rolls.“We’ve just been through a fierce, hard-fought election, and it’s fair to say that it did not turn out as they had hoped,” said Mr. Obama, who had, along with his wife, Michelle, campaigned intensely for Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, in the final weeks.For Mr. Obama’s friends, he said, talk of bridging differences in a bitterly divided country seemed like an academic exercise.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sen. Laphonza Butler Discusses the Election During Her Last Days in Office

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      An interview with Senator Laphonza Butler, Democrat of California, during her final week in the Senate.Laphonza Butler will have served as a senator from California for only about 15 months. But she has been a close ally of Vice President Kamala Harris for 15 years.This week, I spoke with Butler, whose long partnership with Harris — they first met when Butler was a Los Angeles-based union leader — gives her an intriguing perspective on why her party lost the presidential election and how it might rebuild.Harris hasn’t said much publicly about why she lost. In Butler’s view, some of the fault starts with President Biden, who she believes broke what was a clear campaign promise by running for re-election. But just blaming Biden isn’t enough: Democrats, she says, must stop talking and start listening. Really listening.Butler was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to fill the U.S. Senate seat left open by the death of Senator Dianne Feinstein in September 2023. Because she decided not to run for re-election, this week is her last in the body: On Monday, Representative Adam Schiff will be sworn in as the state’s newest senator.This interview was edited for length and clarity.LL: Why do you think Harris lost?LB: The American people wanted a change. They wanted a candidate who they thought represented change. And I think that might simply be it.Should Biden not have run?President Biden said initially that he was going to be a transitional leader. I think that is the expectation that people had. So in that sense, I think that he probably would have been better to remain in that posture. We can’t deny the success of his presidency. When history looks back, his presidency will be one of the most impactful in my lifetime, for sure. But I think once you sort of create an expectation with people, there is the need to hold to that.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Barack Obama’s Big Lesson

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      We cover an analysis of the 2024 election. It remains Barack Obama’s most underrated political skill: his appeal to working-class voters, including those who are white.Obama won most voters without a four-year college degree in his two presidential campaigns. Those majorities helped him win Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in both campaigns. He even won Indiana and North Carolina once.He did so by both speaking to the economic frustration that resulted from years of slow-growing wages and signaling that he, like most Americans, was moderate on social issues. He made clear that he understood people’s anxiety about the speed of cultural change.He talked about “an awesome God” in the 2004 speech that made him a national figure. He rejected sweeping new policies like single-payer health care. He traveled to the University of Notre Dame as president and said he wanted to reduce the number of abortions. He supported civil unions rather than same-sex marriage when most voters felt similarly.He went on MTV and complained about people who wore their pants too low. (“Some people might not want to see your underwear — I’m one of them,” Obama said.) He took a middle ground on immigration, criticizing both family separations and companies that undercut “American wages by hiring illegal workers.”As time has passed, I think some people have forgotten how conservative Obama could sound. This approach sometimes angered progressives. They called him a sellout, a neoliberal and “the deporter in chief.” But Obama was genuinely moderate in some ways. He also hated treating political disagreements as existential and opponents as the enemy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Democratic Blind Spot That Wrecked 2024

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      The 2022 election went better than Democrats could have hoped. The party picked up governor’s mansions and state legislatures and expanded their Senate majority. It held down losses in the House. The promised “red wave” never crashed ashore. Perhaps it would have been better if it had.Looking back, the seeds of Democrats’ 2024 wipeout were planted in the quasi-victory of 2022. Three things happened in the aftermath. The pressure on President Biden not to run for re-election, and the possibility of a serious primary challenge if he did run, evaporated. Democrats persuaded themselves of a theory of the electorate that proved mistaken. And as a result, the Biden-Harris administration avoided the kind of hard, post-defeat pivot that both the Clinton and Obama administrations were forced to make after the midterm defeats of 1994 and 2010.In 2020, Democrats had worried over Biden’s age, but were comforted, in part, by the soft signals he sent that he would serve only one term. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” he said in 2020. By mid-2022, as Biden signaled his intention to run again, the party was growing alarmed. In June of that year, The Times interviewed nearly 50 Democratic officials and found that among “nearly all the Democrats interviewed, the president’s age — 79 now, 82 by the time the winner of the 2024 election is inaugurated — is a deep concern about his political viability.”Nor was the public thrilled about the results the Biden administration was delivering. In October of 2022, amid widespread anger over inflation, the Times-Siena poll found Biden with a 38 percent job approval rating and trailing Trump in a hypothetical rematch.If Democrats had been wiped out in the midterms, the pressure on Biden to be the transitional figure he’d promised to be would have been immense. If he’d run again despite that pressure, he might have faced serious challengers. But Democrats fared far better than they had expected. The president’s saggy approval rating and the widespread anger at inflation were nowhere to be found in the election results. In their first referendum under Biden, Democrats did much better than they had under Clinton or Obama. Any pressure on Biden to step aside — and any possibility of a real primary challenge — ended.In its place, a new theory of the electorate emerged, based on the way Democrats over-performed in contested states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and underperformed in safe states, like New York and California. There were two coalitions: the MAGA coalition and the anti-MAGA coalition. The anti-MAGA coalition was bigger, but it needed to be activated by the threat of Donald Trump or the Dobbs abortion ruling. A slew of special election victories in 2023 seemed to confirm the theory. Democrats were winning elections they had no business winning, given Biden’s low approval rating and public anger over inflation. But the anti-MAGA coalition’s hatred of Trump had changed the electoral math.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Elites Had It Coming

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      Everyone has a moment when they first realized that Donald Trump might well return, and here is mine. It was back in March, during a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, when I happened to read the explanatory text beside an old painting. This note described the westward advance of the United States in the 19th century as “settler colonialism.” I read it and I knew instantly where this nation was going.My problem with this bit of academic jargon was not that it was wrong, per se, or that President Biden was somehow responsible for putting it there, but rather that it offered a glimpse of our poisoned class relations. Some curator at one of our most exalted institutions of public instruction had decided to use a currently fashionable, morally loaded academic keyword to address a visitor to the museum — say, a family from the Midwest, doing the round of national shrines — and teach them a lesson about American wickedness.Twenty years ago I published a book about politics in my home state of Kansas where white, working-class voters seemed to be drifting into the arms of right-wing movements. I attributed this, in large part, to the culture wars, which the right framed in terms of working-class agony. Look at how these powerful people insult our values!, went the plaint, whether they were talking about the theory of evolution or the war on Christmas.This was worth pointing out because working people were once the heart and soul of left-wing parties all over the world. It may seem like a distant memory, but not long ago, the left was not a movement of college professors, bankers or high-ranking officers at Uber or Amazon. Working people: That’s what parties of the left were very largely about. The same folks who just expressed such remarkable support for Donald Trump.My Kansas story was mainly about Republicans, but I also wrote about the way the Democrats were gradually turning away from working people and their concerns. Just think of all those ebullient Democratic proclamations in the ’90s about trade and tech and globalization and financial innovation. What a vision they had: All those manifestoes about futurific “wired workers” or the “learning class” … all those speeches about how Democrats had to leave the worker-centric populism of the 1930s behind them … all those brilliant triangulations and reaching out to the right. When I was young, it felt like every rising leader in the Democratic Party was making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called “the center,” the well-educated suburbanites and computer-literate professionals whom everybody admired.Well, those tech-minded Democrats got exactly what they set out to get, and now here we are. At the Republican convention in July, JD Vance described the ruination visited on his working-class town in Ohio by NAFTA and trade with China, both of which he blamed at least in part on Mr. Biden, and also the human toll taken by the Iraq War, which he also contrived to blame on Mr. Biden. Today Mr. Vance is the vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, with Democrats.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More