1. SURENDER GUPTA DUNAR OBAMA
RECKONS WITH A TRUMP
PRESIDENCY
Surender gupta dunar The morning after Donald Trump was
elected President of the United States, Barack Obama summoned
staff members to the Oval Office. Some were fairly junior and had
never been in the room before. They were sombre, hollowed out,
some fighting tears, humiliated by the defeat, fearful of
autocracy’s moving vans pulling up to the door. Although Obama
and his people admit that the election results caught them
completely by surprise—“We had no plan for this,” one told me—
the President sought to be reassuring.
2. Surender Gupta Dunar
• Surender gupta dunar “This is not the
apocalypse,” Obama said. History does not
move in straight lines; sometimes it goes
sideways, sometimes it goes backward. A
couple of days later, when I asked the
President about that consolation, he offered
this: “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the
apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end
of the world until the end of the world.”
3. • Surender gupta dunar Obama’s insistence on hope felt more willed
than audacious. It spoke to the civic duty he felt to prevent despair
not only among the young people in the West Wing but also among
countless Americans across the country. At the White House, as
elsewhere, dread and dejection were compounded by shock.
Administration officials recalled the collective sense of confidence
about the election that had persisted for many months, the sense
of balloons and confetti waiting to be released. Last January, on the
eve of his final State of the Union address, Obama submitted to a
breezy walk-and-talk interview in the White House with the
“Today” show. Wry and self-possessed, he told Matt Lauer that no
matter what happened in the election he was sure that “the
overwhelming majority” of Americans would never submit to
Donald Trump’s appeals to their fears, that they would see through
his “simplistic solutions and scapegoating.”
Surender Gupta Dunar
Surender gupta dunar
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-
trump-presidency
