Former Obama Staffers Reveal How Profoundly Trump Blindsided Them in 2016

While former President Barack Obama’s legacy in the White House is set in stone, President Donald Trump still has just under three more years to continue cementing his. There’s no way Obama could’ve predicted Trump’s first election in 2016, but new interviews revealed that he had a blind spot for Trump…that backfired dramatically.

Columbia University just released an oral archive of Obama’s presidency, featuring over 450 interviews and 1,000 hours of audio and video from former administration officials, activists and organizers. It took almost seven years to get the archive off the ground, with most of the work reportedly being done during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to ABC 7 News.

While Obama did not sit down for an interview himself, his former staffers certainly had plenty to say about his successor. Before Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, the overwhelming consensus among the Obama staff was that the Republican’s campaign was a joke…little did they know Trump would secure two presidential terms.

Trump never confirmed exactly what inspired his political career, but many Obama staffers pointed the fingers to their former boss, saying the Republican’s disdain for Obama is why he decided to run for office.

“Trump’s candidacy,” Josh Earnest, Obama’s last White House press secretary, started. “The essence of his being and everything that he stood for and everything about the way that he carried himself and everything that he championed and his rhetoric, his campaign tactics — all were anathema to everything that the Obama campaign and the Obama era, the Obama administration, had been about,” the New York Times reported.

Obama’s two terms were rattled with birtherism conspiracies from Trump and other anti-Obama politicians. Everything came to a head during the 2011 the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, when Obama jabbed at Trump’s racist comments. In response, the Democrat’s staffers said Trump retaliated in a way no one ever expected.

“I don’t think any of us really anticipated that Donald Trump would be a serious candidate for president, much less president,” former chief strategist David Axelrod said in an interview. “I kind of chuckled at it and went to my seat,” he continued referring to the correspondents dinner.

According to the interviews, all the roasts during the dinner hit the Republican pretty hard. Fast forward to 2015 when Trump walked down that escalator to announce his candidacy.

“Nobody took it seriously at the time,” Cody Keenan, a speechwriter for Obama, said. Instead of focusing on Trump as a potential threat, Obama virtually ignored him and focused on the Affordable Care Act, rescuing the auto industry, bringing home most of the Iraq troops and recovering from the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression.

By the time everyone looked up, however, Trump’s rise was inevitable. He quickly secured the Republican nomination despite drab expectations, and his MAGA slogan reached millions of Americans. When election night came in 2016, Obama’s staffers were still putting all of their eggs in the Hillary Clinton basket.

“At the time, I don’t think anybody thought Donald Trump was going to win,” Mr. Keenan said while acknowledging that Trump woke up something in the country. “None of this began with Donald Trump. These were trends that have been happening for a long time, stoking fear of the others, stoking misinformation, kind of this phony populism that turned people against each other.”

The day after the election, Obama reportedly called his aides to the Oval Office to comfort them. “What struck me in those days after Trump won was even in the midst of that how steady [the president] was,” Jon Favreau, Obama’s former speech writer, said. “I expected to find him depressed, alarmed, panicked. None of that.”