A week before election day, Barack Obama took to the airwaves and warned his listeners that were Donald Trump to become his successor, the billionaire would spend his first couple of weeks in the Oval Office “reversing every single thing that we’ve done”.
The comment was designed to frighten Obama loyalists, particularly African Americans, to the polls. But now that that fear has become reality, and Trump is indeed to become the 45th president of the United States, the idea that the Obama legacy is imperiled sounds all too realistic.
For a start, the signature legislative achievement of the Obama years – the Affordable Care Act – is now certain to come under attack from the incoming Trump administration. The president-elect has made it a mantra of his 18 months on the campaign trail that on day one in the White House he would ask Congress to repeal the legislation.
Trump has been less energetic in setting out how he would provide for the almost 13 million people who are currently in receipt of health insurance through Obamacare. He has also promised to protect people with pre-existing medical conditions, without saying how he would pay for that.
But given the Trump campaign’s assault on the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s key piece of legislation must now be seen to be mortally threatened. So too are many of the other policy passions pursued by Obama in his second term, when he relied increasingly on his executive powers as a means of breaking the gridlock in Congress.
Obama’s substantial use of executive orders – reforms introduced without the seal of Congress – has been a double-edged sword for the sitting president. It allowed him to bypass intransigent Republicans in the House and get stuff done with the stroke of a pen, or 235 strokes of a pen, to be precise.
But it left his legacy exposed to being swept aside with a similar stroke of the pen, just as soon as incoming President Trump gets his feet under the Resolute desk on his first working day, 21 January 2017. Among the many Obama reforms that could be swiftly undone are his efforts to combat climate change.
In August 2015 Obama announced his clean power plan, which seeks to reduce emissions from power plants and switch from polluting coal energy to sustainable wind and solar. The plan is currently on hold in the courts, but Trump is now in a position to kill it off entirely before the judges get to release their ruling.
Similarly, the Democratic president’s attempts to introduce gun control through executive orders in the wake of a succession of devastating rampages such as that in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 are now all at the mercy of Trump, who repeatedly invoked the second amendment on the campaign trail. On immigration, Obama’s attempts unilaterally to extend legal status to millions of young immigrants who entered the US illegally and their parents through the Daca and Dapa programs respectively could fall foul of Trump’s threat to overturn both initiatives.
On the world stage, Obama came to power promising in his famous “new beginning” speech in Cairo to show “mutual respect” for other peoples and their governments, and a renewed drive to build alliances rather than to engage in diplomacy through confrontation. He has sought to bring home the US military from wars abroad, and talked about his ambition to move towards a world without nuclear weapons.
Though his actual achievements – from Afghanistan to Iraq and Syria – are patchy and a matter of ongoing fierce debate, in Trump the US would have a world leader dedicated to moving in a diametrically opposed direction. Trump has replaced Obama’s emphasis on alliances with admiration for the authoritarian rule of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, threatened to stop defending Nato allies that fail to pay their way, and turned the rhetoric on nuclear weapons on its head by suggesting Japan and South Korea should be allowed to become nuclear powers.
If President Trump manages to act on even a small percentage of these pledges, his predecessor’s legacy could quickly appear to be in tatters.
