Donald Trump’s Hope and Change

Obama-Trump voters are a counter-intuitive phenomenon, given that, on a superficial level at least, the two presidents have very different styles. Obama had the positive vibe (“Yes we can”), whereas Trump spent a lot of time on the paranoid, racist fantasy that Obama was born in Kenya. Speaking in October 2016, Noam Chomsky pointed out that they share a message of ‘change’, and that overlap attracted a significant number of former Obama voters to vote for Trump in 2016.

This is a big enough phenomenon that it has its own Wikipedia page. According to a study by the American National Election Survey, an astonishing 13% of Trump voters had previously voted for Obama. The fact that more than one in eight Trump voters had previously voted for Obama is astonishing on the surface. The polling agency Gallup records ‘unfavourable’ ratings – by the end of the 2016 election campaign Donald Trump’s unfavourable rating (61%) was the highest in six decades of presidential polling. But Clinton’s rating (52%) was the second highest.

By 2017 polling suggested that a significant number of these voters had turned against Trump. Warren Rogers, a Obama-Trump voter, has said that he “viewed myself as not voting for Hillary.” Mike Alberta viewed the treatment of Obama by Fox News and Trump by CNN as parallels to each other. This demographic includes non-white ethnicities – Lutki Gayop, the son of Haitian immigrants voted for both Obama and Trump. In this year’s elections, the Democrat Party’s ‘Blue Wave’ seems to have been most successful in the areas Trump gained from Obama.

Obama presented himself as a challenger to the establishment, a bold, radical idealist, but didn’t see this through when he took office. The financial advisors who played prominent parts in his campaign (including Austan Goolsbee, who argued that AIG should receive “a Nobel Prize – for evil”) were replaced with pro-Wall Street advisors such as Timothy Geithner. The Obama administration then protected the perpetrators of the 2008 economic crash from punishment. Maybe this isn’t surprising considering that Obama’s top donor was Goldman Sachs, but it’s a long way from the idealism that Obama promised.

While he appears to have exaggerated the part his administration played in the oil industry almost doubling in size under his presidency, Obama’s ‘All of the Above’ energy policy drew criticism from environmental groups. On a superficial level, Obama’s first inauguration prominently featured Rick Warren, a pastor who had opposed gay marriage and abortion rights.

Of course the economy grew under Obama – all things considered he was a competent establishment president. But he was far from the radical he ran as. Given how quickly he flipped his economic team – during George W. Bush’s lame-duck period – it’s legitimate to consider Barack Obama a similar type of con-artist to Donald Trump. Obama was the victim of racist dog-whistle attacks by Fox News and the world’s most powerful TV gameshow host, and in my harshest opinion is a smoother, more convincing con-artist than Trump. But it’s legitimate to compare the two – Obama’s greater subtlety doesn’t excuse him from criticism for his actions.