The Long Alliance, page 32
At the microphone that Thursday evening, Obama took a more considered tone, distilling his political ethos for a crowd that had heard it before. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, he repeated, as he so often had, citing Martin Luther King Jr. He conceded that history doesn’t always proceed in a straight line, and that Trump’s win was unexpected. But, he said, trying to spark some enthusiasm for his final two months in office, they’d accomplished a lot—the unemployment rate was down, wars were winding down, health care was more accessible than ever—and they still had some tasks to finish. Progress moves forward, he said.
Some of the Democrats in the room sought and found comfort in Obama’s words. The rest could have been forgiven for assuming he was on autopilot, since it all sounded a lot like what he usually said, even before a racist sexual harasser with demagogic tendencies was elected to lead the free world. In truth, Obama was already nearly forty-eight hours into consolation mode. He’d taken it upon himself to buck up his shell-shocked staff with a similar message in a series of meetings starting on the Wednesday morning after election day.
Biden, meanwhile, had started Wednesday in the Naval Observatory and then his West Wing office by questioning everything, beginning with the polls. How the hell did this happen? he kept asking his aides before shaking it off with obvious effort and, with Ricchetti at his side, insisting, This is a democracy. We’re going to do our jobs. They told their own staff, plenty of whom had spent the previous few weeks lining up roles in the Clinton administration, to focus on their day-to-day tasks as much as possible. Biden soon joined Obama in the Oval to confer just as Clinton was giving her concession speech in Manhattan. They didn’t watch, and when they emerged the VP joined Obama in reassuring the staff some more. At least, they did as much as they could, considering that they, themselves, could use reassurance, too. No one could give it to them.
Obama’s primary concern was his meeting with Trump on Thursday. He spent Wednesday night and part of that morning considering the man as he never had before. He mused that surely Trump was a chameleon who did whatever was in his best interest at any given time. Trump couldn’t possibly be as crazy as his campaign persona, and had to be susceptible to some friendly banter, which might at least open him up to Obama’s suggestions. Right?
In person, Obama first focused on immediate dangers, hoping to scare Trump into responsibility by warning him about the North Korean threat and against hiring Michael Flynn, Trump’s preferred national security advisor candidate, a former Defense Intelligence Agency director whom Obama regarded as possibly compromised and certainly a loose cannon. He also tried reasoning with Trump about his own legacy, though he didn’t put it that way. Instead, he appealed to Trump’s sense of political expediency. The Republican had campaigned on tearing up Obamacare, but the outgoing president suggested he should keep in place its most popular pieces, like protections for preexisting conditions. He tried advocating for programs for people who’d been brought into the country as undocumented minors, too, and for his nuclear deal with Iran. Obama left the meeting unsure if he’d gotten through to Trump, who kept talking about his crowd sizes. But he was hopeful that the new president was as open to guidance as he professed to be. Either way, Obama was convinced it was worth continuing to try to save some of his vulnerable policy wins.
He was mobbed by fellow world leaders two weeks later, at a conference in Lima, Peru. Most were desperate for advice on how to deal with Trump, but Obama still didn’t have good answers. Instead, he urged some trusted allies to just keep their joint liberal project going. At one quiet meeting with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, Obama acknowledged that Trump’s ascension would mean the end of the TPP as he’d fought for it. When Turnbull raised the idea of countries like Australia forging ahead with the deal without the United States, Obama replied that he liked the concept but suggested Turnbull refrain from putting his approval in writing. “You never know who is listening,” Obama said. He didn’t want it to look like he was coordinating with foreign leaders to influence his successor less than a month after the election. Trump probably wouldn’t change his mind on much if he saw other countries coming together without him, Obama told his counterparts, but maybe he’d reconsider if he felt real competitive pressure from outside America.
Publicly, Obama insisted that Trump might still be different from what the crowd in Lima feared, and that he could be persuadable. This became a refrain among the gathered leaders, and some of them took to hopefully paraphrasing former New York governor Mario Cuomo: maybe Trump campaigned in poetry; he might govern in prose. Chilean president Michelle Bachelet shut that talk down in a small session away from the microphones. “I didn’t notice a lot of poetry in that election,” she told her colleagues.
* * *
By the time he’d landed in Lima, Obama was deep into an outwardly philosophical but inwardly scattered search for an explanation. In the earliest days after Trump won, he asked some trusted advisors what they thought the election had meant. His own view seemed to waver as he weighed the possibilities. Sometimes he posited that it was just a freak accident, the product of political circumstances no one could have predicted. Other times, it was because people were bored with all the successes of his own administration and Clinton hadn’t done a good enough job convincing them. He never let himself take the natural next step and wonder what would have happened had he encouraged Biden, not Clinton, earlier. But maybe, he occasionally mused in angry moments, it was nothing less than a rejection of his own vision of America.
In Peru, he was in one of his dark places. Seeing other leaders’ fear juxtaposed with the masses still lining the streets to see him, he considered the possibility that he’d had too optimistic a view of a globalized world and culture, and that he, Clinton, and their followers had underestimated tribal anger, no matter how much they had accomplished for Trump’s voters. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was ten or twenty years too early,” he admitted to Ben Rhodes, who later recalled the reflection in his memoir.
Back in Washington, Obama’s political aides told him about the sheer number of voters who’d backed Trump after supporting him twice, purely because they wanted “change,” whatever it meant. He understood this impulse, he said, and started talking about these voters as one key to the surprise.
But even this, a month after the election, wasn’t entirely consistent. Obama was still sure that if he could have run for a third term, he would have won.
* * *
There weren’t many days in the fall of 2016 when Biden wasn’t thinking, or gabbing, about what came next for him. Ricchetti had taken Biden’s broad-strokes instructions—he wanted not only to stay engaged with international affairs and domestic policy so as not to become suddenly irrelevant after half a century in office but also to make some real money for the first time in his life—and whittled them into arrangements with the University of Delaware and the University of Pennsylvania, a cancer research–funding initiative, plus plans for a speaking tour and a book deal. (He also considered a podcast and a political nonprofit, but decided against both.) Biden was getting excited about this final stage of his life. He would spend more time by the beach in Rehoboth and occasionally pop by DC to visit friends and stay at the house he and Jill were planning to rent in McLean, Virginia, so she could keep teaching at Northern Virginia Community College. So when, about a week and a half before election day, Politico reported that Clinton was considering asking Biden to be her secretary of state, he quickly told his aides this was just a float meant to flatter him, and that he wouldn’t even consider it.
There wasn’t much reconsideration of his retirement the week Trump won, either. What did change was his sanguinity about the plan. Biden was plainly shaken for days after the election, though he wasn’t as obvious in his existential searching as Obama. Instead, he appeared to harden in the convictions that had been bubbling inside him for the last year. When former South Carolina Democratic Party chairman Dick Harpootlian visited Biden at the White House a few days after the election, Biden told him he didn’t regret not running, since he wouldn’t have been able to withstand the emotional rigors of a campaign—especially not one as brutal as 2016’s had been. Harpootlian replied that the VP would have to think about running in 2020, to which Biden said his main immediate personal concern was making money, primarily to ensure a comfortable future for Beau’s children. But within days, he also started whispering to some senior Democrats he considered allies that Clinton had been the wrong candidate for the moment, and that he would have won if he could have run. When he saw Simas, he thought back to the Obama aide’s insistence that Clinton’s lack of trustworthiness wouldn’t be important, since no one trusted Trump, either. Biden asked him, “Oh, trust doesn’t matter, huh?” and kept walking.
Between Biden and Obama themselves, though, waves of intense nostalgia flooded every interaction. Both carefully tried to put the 2015 experience aside and instead reminisced about their near-decade’s worth of partnership and personal connection. Biden was moved when, in early January, Obama took time out of his farewell address in Chicago to acknowledge him: “To Joe Biden, the scrappy kid from Scranton who became Delaware’s favorite son, you were the first decision I made as a nominee, and it was the best,” he said. “Not just because you have been a great vice president, but because in the bargain I gained a brother. And we love you and Jill like family, and your friendship has been one of the great joys of our lives.”
Only Ricchetti and Jill knew a greater tribute was coming two days later, when Obama would ambush Biden with a tear-soaked awarding of the Medal of Freedom, at which he recited their joint accomplishments and called Biden, “I believe, the finest vice president we have ever seen. And I also think he has been a lion of American history.” Obama went on, expanding on his emotions as he rarely had in public: “To know Joe Biden is to know love without pretense, service without self-regard, and to live life fully.”
The surprise ceremony was broadcast live on cable, and Biden—overwhelmed by the distinction, the abrupt appearance of his family and friends in the White House’s State Dining Room, and the presence of a hastily outlined acceptance speech prepared in the last forty-five minutes by the vaguely-clued-in Bedingfield and speechwriter Vinay Reddy—cried more openly than he was used to doing, too, in full view of the world. He understood that the hypersentimental moment would be seen as the capstone of their relationship, and also, therefore, of his career. He thanked his family first, at length, before turning to Obama.
Biden had already been thinking about how to thank him, and it all spilled out. “Mr. President, you have more than kept your commitment to me by saying that you wanted me to help govern,” he said. “Every single thing you’ve asked me to do, Mr. President, you have trusted me to do. And that is, that’s a remarkable thing,” he continued, rambling and overwhelmed. “I don’t think, according to the presidential, vice presidential scholars, that kind of relationship has existed. I mean, for real. It’s all you, Mr. President, it’s all you.” He couldn’t stop escalating, insisting that the reason he’d been able to be an effective global messenger for Obama was “because we not only have the same political philosophy and ideology, I tell everybody, and I’ve told them from the beginning—and I’m not saying this to reciprocate—I’ve never known a president, and few people I’ve ever met [in] my whole life—I can count [them] on less than one hand—who have had the integrity and the decency and the sense of other people’s needs like you do.”
In retrospect, the lovefest might have felt incongruous with the pitch-black political environment. The day before, Trump had used his first press conference as president-elect to sharply attack the press corps. But nothing felt off about it inside the White House, where the tears never stopped flowing, or on TV, where the ceremony was mostly treated like the profoundly emotional gathering it obviously was to everyone involved. Obama left the room beaming at having been able to do that for Biden, his uncharacteristic giddiness obvious even to aides who didn’t know him well. Biden showed up at a reception hours later back at the Naval Observatory still clutching the medal.
* * *
Bill Clinton didn’t want to go to Trump’s inauguration, concerned for his safety and uninterested in dignifying the new president. Hillary convinced him to go so they could send a message of continuity for the good of the country—they would just get it over with and get out of there. George W. Bush thought it was “some weird shit.” Obama and Biden each felt similarly. They approached the event like a funeral and departed the second they could.
Obama wanted to get far away, and directed his plane to Palm Springs in Southern California, where he intended to unplug and become essentially unreachable for a while. He was ready to get past the ceremony of his departure, and only brought a few people beyond the family—confidants like Jarrett and Rhodes—along for the ride.
Biden, smiling broadly, got on an Amtrak Acela train bound for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Railroad Station in Wilmington, surrounded by a cabin full of cameras, family members, aides, and a retinue of elected officials. It was “full circle,” he told the CNN reporter who followed him onboard that afternoon, almost like he was trying to force the final emotional scene of his own biography. “I’m going home to Delaware, the people I owe.”
* * *
Obama never did a very good job of hiding his romantic notions of New York. He hadn’t lived there since graduating from Columbia, but whenever an aide moved there, he grilled them about the neighborhood where they were planning to live and the things they were planning to do, openly fantasizing about walking the city streets anonymously. As president, he liked to linger at restaurants and donors’ penthouses when he got to visit, and he often wondered aloud if it would be possible to move to the Upper East Side with Michelle once their post–White House Secret Service detail shrank a bit. The consensus was that it wouldn’t be very feasible at all because of their security requirements, though, and the Obamas decided they would stay in Washington at least until Sasha graduated from high school. This dampened the chatter about their next steps for a while, but in the final months of the Obama administration they couldn’t help but think about it again, even once they had a home lined up for themselves in northwest DC’s Kalorama neighborhood. No one ever thought they would return to Chicago, but maybe they would at least buy a pied-à-terre in New York, the rumors went, or a house in Palm Springs, or even in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina?
The gossip continued into the early weeks of their post–White House era, the Obamas only effectively putting it to rest by installing a pool at their new home in the capital. The now-former president and first lady rented work space, too, from the World Wildlife Fund in Washington’s West End, near Georgetown. They placed nearly two dozen staffers in the suite, which they decorated with dark wood and memorabilia from Obama’s time in office, including a photograph of an Obama ancestor that had been presented to him by the Irish government, Norman Rockwell’s painting of Ruby Bridges signed by the subject herself, and a framed American flag given to him by the Navy SEALs who killed bin Laden. The Obamas were planning to stay in town for the foreseeable future, never mind that they’d never liked Washington much or that Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, moved in around the corner.
This wasn’t much of a concern because, at least at first, they wouldn’t actually be spending much time in the district. Their newfound freedom meant space to vacation with other supercelebrities—Oprah Winfrey, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Hanks on David Geffen’s yacht in French Polynesia on one trip, kitesurfing off Richard Branson’s private Caribbean island on another—and also to try to unwind. Obama had bristled at the common impression of him as obsessive and uptight that was burnished by a mid-2016 Times profile of his habits. That piece had reported his preferred late-night snack as “seven lightly salted almonds.” Among friends, he’d shake his head and say it was usually (but not always) more than seven. Now, he was still seldom without his iPad, but he was just as often playing a Scrabble-like game as reading the Times or Vox News, and planning his next round of golf. He took to undoing one extra button on his dress shirts and usually stopped himself from talking about the aspects of the presidency he missed by pointing out that now he was sleeping much more. Sometimes he compared the new, slower pace of his life to the scenes from the Matrix movies where Keanu Reeves’s Neo character dodges gunfire by perceiving time at a snail’s pace.
Back home, he quickly receded from the public eye, eager for privacy but also so wary of hangers-on that he more or less cut off personal contact with anyone who wasn’t a genuine friend, a move that had the effect of tightening his inner circle even further than before, since so many of his close advisors and allies left town for New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles when Trump took over. He hated the belief that he was antisocial even more than the almonds report—“I’m not fucking aloof,” he’d say whenever that common description made it into an article he read about himself—but before long, he was having semiregular meals and hangouts at home with Jarrett and Eric Holder and Ron Kirk, his former trade representative, and vanishingly few others.
