Much has been made over the last week, both favorably and unfavorably, of the magnitude of President Donald Trump’s erasure of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) legacy.
I disagree with that coverage. Trump has been mitigating, if not correcting, as many of Obama’s errors as he can, but he’s done nothing about Obama’s legacy, which includes the following far from exhaustive list:
- apologizing to the world for our successes
- bowing to world leaders, deeply on several occasions
- alienating our friends and toadying up to our enemies
- attacking Israel for insisting on defending itself
- demanding that Israel accept the pre-1967 borders as the Obama administration’s price of peace
- excusing Hamas terrorism against Israel
- turning his back on Iraq
- telling Great Britain to take their bust of Winston Churchill and….
- telling Great Britain that if they leave the EU they can’t count on trade deals with the US any time soon
- insisting that Daesh was a JV team and then refusing to confront them when they exploded over Iraq and Syria
- drawing red lines in Syria over al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own civilians and then ducking away from those lines
- creating the JCPOA, to which even French President Francois Hollande objected at the time
- his State Department’s too expensive “Reset” with Russia
- acquiescing to Russian occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine
- acquiescing to People’s Republic of China’s seizure of the South China Sea
- acquiescing to northern Korea’s nuclear weapons expansion in the name of “strategic patience”
- agreeing the Paris Climate Accord
- passing Obamacare
- passing Dodd-Frank
- routinely governing by diktat Executive Order rather than working through Congress
While many of these failures have yet to be addressed, substantial progress is being made.
No, Obama’s legacy is intact. It’s a legacy of deep, abject, and unbroken failure.