The Obama-Trump Transition Did Not Proceed Smoothly

As the presidential term of Barack Obama counts down to its last two days, the outgoing president has decided to make life somewhat difficult for incoming President Trump, despite a post-election promise to make the transition process “smooth and efficient.”

Just two days after Trump won the recent presidential election, the Republican candidate met with Obama in the White House for an hour and a half to present a face of unity for the upcoming administration transition. But that cordial meeting, which went on far longer than it had been expected to, was not an example of what was to come.

Certainly, the transition since then has been going much more roughly than Obama’s own transition from the George W. Bush administration eight years ago. At that time, Bush’s team served as a model of cooperation and integrity that Obama’s advisors still talk about.

Instead, this transition period recalls the difficult one from former President Bill Clinton to then-incoming President Bush in the year 2001. At that time, the Democrats were still smarting from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision regarding the Florida election recount and the loss of Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore. Some Clinton officials were accused of removing the “W” keys from many computer keyboards at the White House in an administrative prank.

In November of last year, immediately following Trump’s victory, President Obama’s spokesman Josh Earnest slammed Trump for four consecutive days over supposed Russian meddling in the election, and Obama eventually joined the effort and sanctioned Russia in several ways, closing and booting out diplomatic staff from two suspected Russian spy houses in Oyster Bay, New York and Pioneer Point, Maryland.

Obama also chimed in on a Congressional call for hearings into intelligence service reports of Russian hacking. “What we’ve simply said is the facts, which are that, based on uniform intelligence assessments, the Russians were responsible for hacking the DNC [Democratic National Committee], and that, as a consequence, it is important for us to review all elements of that and make sure that we are preventing that kind of interference through cyber attacks in the future,” the outgoing president said. “That should be a bipartisan issue; that shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”

Obama also hammered away at the topic at his last official press conference as president. “My hope is that… President-elect [Trump] is going to similarly be concerned with making sure we don’t have potential foreign influence in our election process.”

In fact, it’s probable that Obama was the instigator of the whole effort to push the Russian hacking affair on the media; former Obama aide and advisor David Axelrod said it was “highly unlikely” that Earnest would have taken so many verbal shots at Trump regarding Russia without Obama’s explicit approval.

Even Michelle Obama got in on the act of slamming the nation’s new president-elect, saying of Trump’s win, “We’re feeling what not having hope feels like,” and that with her husband gone from the White House, Americans “will come to appreciate having [had] a grown-up in the White House.” Rhetorically, she asked Oprah Winfrey on the latter’s television show, “What do you give your kids if you can’t give them hope? What if we don’t have hope, Oprah?”

Trump tactfully fired back at the First Lady at a “Thank You” rally in Alabama. “Michelle Obama said yesterday that there’s no hope. But I assume she was talking about the past, not the future, because I’m telling you, we have tremendous hope. We are going to be so successful as a country again. I actually think she made that statement not meaning it the way it came out,” Trump stated.

“I really do. Because I met with President Obama and Michelle Obama in the White House; my wife was there. She could not have been nicer. I honestly believe she meant that statement in a different way than it came out because I believe there is tremendous hope, and beyond hope, we have such potential.”

The accusations over Russian hacking weren’t the only moves Obama made to make life difficult for Trump. He also enacted rules to protect funding for abortion provider organization Planned Parenthood, ordered detainees transferred from the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and abstained from a UN vote on criticizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank and in Jerusalem.

Of the Israeli UN vote, Trump tweeted that Obama’s actions will “make it much harder to negotiate peace. Too bad, but we will get it done anyway!”

Obama also freed 232 federal inmates and wrote pardons for 78 others. Trump tweeted that he was attempting to “disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks. Thought it was going to be a smooth transition — NOT!”

It’s true that Trump may be able to roll back many or even all of Obama’s actions, but it will mean taking time out from his own priorities to do so. “[Obama’s] doing all this stuff as his legacy,” claimed Newt Gingrich, the Republican former Speaker of the House. Gingrich compared the outgoing president to a petulant god out of a Wagnerian opera.

“The Republicans are freaking out because all of a sudden Obama is doing a lot of governing,” remarked Matt Bennett, senior vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a progressive think tank. “They don’t like it. I get that. But he’s in his right to do it, and he should do it. Is he trying to box Trump in? You bet — and he should.”

Admittedly, Obama is mostly to blame for the antipathy between the administrations. Trump’s vows to reverse Obama policies including Obamacare, climate change agreements and the Iranian nuclear deal have obviously provoked Obama to some extent. Obama has admitted that “there’s still feelings that are raw out there.”

Former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway suggested that Obama, Hillary Clinton and Trump should call a truce if they “actually love the country enough.”

“If you want to shut this down, and you actually love the country enough to have the peaceful transition in our great democracy between the Obama administration and the Trump administration, there are a couple people in pretty prominent positions. One is named Obama, [and] one is named Hillary Clinton, [and] since his people are trying to fight over her election still, they could shut this down,” claimed Conway.

Still, the Obama administration has been making a few honest efforts. Obama’s Chief of Staff Denis McDonough hosted incoming Chief of Staff Reince Priebus recently in a show of public cooperation. When journalists asked McDonough how it felt to have Priebus in the White House, McDonough said, “It feels good to have him here.”

At some point during the transition, Obama and Trump spoke on the phone.

Afterward, Trump insisted to the press from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida that the process was proceeding “very, very smoothly” and that the conversation with Obama had been “very, very nice. Our staffs have been getting along very well, and I’m getting along with him other than a couple of statements that I responded to.”

Nonetheless, historians will probably look at this process as one of the rockier transitions in modern presidential history. To be sure, for Donald Trump, Inauguration Day can’t come soon enough. Every day that Barack Obama remains in the White House likely represents several days (or weeks) for Trump and his administration to undo his actions. From that perspective, the future for Trump definitely looks rosier than the present.


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