Over the coming weeks, everyone and their dog will take their turn analyzing Donald Trump’s electoral victory and coming up with a thousand different theories as to what happened. Some of them will be more believable than others. But no true tale of Trump’s phenomenal rise is complete without mentioning Barack Obama.
Obama, of course, wasn’t on the ballot this time around, but in many ways – he was. If Americans had been pleased with the job he’d done over the last eight years, Trump would not have won. The voters would have (grudgingly, perhaps) handed his legacy to Hillary Clinton, confident that she would keep it intact. Instead, they came out in force to reject everything Obama has stood for.
As a president who has been overly preoccupied with his own legacy, Obama cannot look at Tuesday night’s results as anything but his lowest moment. Barring any unforeseen snags in the road, Trump will erase much of Obama’s agenda within months of taking office. Obamacare is finished. The move towards open borders is done. Dodd-Frank is history. If Trump is half the president his supporters believe he can be, Obama’s only lasting impact will be the color of his skin.
Speaking of skin color, ignore the liberal pundits who are trying to make Trump’s victory all about race. This was not – in any form, in any fashion – about some ugly rise of white nationalism.
At the same time, though, there is a reason white voters came out in unprecedented force to support Donald Trump. It’s not that white America is scared of going extinct, it’s that the Democratic Party and the liberal media has done everything possible to make white people feel unwelcome in their own country for eight long years. So they shouldn’t act surprised when those white Americans – some of whom had never before voted for a Republican – decided to stand up and say, “You know what, we’re still here whether you like it or not.”
On Tuesday morning, analysts were still talking about all the work the Republican Party would have to do to find its way back to national relevance. On Wednesday morning, they were saying the same about the Democrats.
But if Trump can unify the country around an agenda that brings back jobs and obliterates the worst of the Obama legacy, everyday Democrats may realize they have no further use for their old stronghold.
