But what America’s forces of progress have long understood is that America’s ideals are a trap that can be sprung on those who betray them, and Trump has betrayed them. What Democrats have not known, at least since Obama, is how to spring that trap.
Trump’s dominance of the post-Obama landscape has led many Democrats to abandon the optimism of Obamaism. If Trump is what Obama’s politics got us, then what good were they, really?
But that’s the wrong lesson. Trump has, since Obama, faced a series of Democrats who could not tell America’s story as he could, and often did not even try. He has faced a left that saw Obama’s belief in America as naïve, who sought a more direct and constant confrontation with our sins than with our hopes, who spoke more of our villains than of our heroes.
And even so, Trump’s record of converting the American people to his cause has been poor. He lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost both the popular vote and the election in 2020. And while he won the White House and the popular vote back in 2024, buoyed by inflation, he quickly saw his standing collapse to one of the lowest levels of any modern president at this point in his second term.
There is room to take back from Trump not just the story of America but the definition of what it means to be a good American. Obama, clearly, sees political possibility in Trump’s venality and indecency. He braided his speech with an encomium to values that he believes unite most Americans, even now:
A belief that qualities of character, honesty, integrity, kindness, compassion, a sense of duty and honor, those things matter in our public dealings, just as they do in our private lives.
These are the values and traditions I believe in, and they are not Republican or Democratic values. They’re American values we can all share, regardless of party, values every president here today, as different as we are, has tried our best to uphold, values that John McCain and Mitt Romney believed in, no less than I did.
It is our greatest inheritance, the story of America at its best, because it reflects a basic faith in the decency of our fellow citizens and the possibility that despite all of our differences, we can see each other and understand one another and make common cause together.
Is he right? When CNN polled the standings of every living president, Obama topped them all, with 57 percent approval. Trump is languishing at 34 percent. In the contests to come, there will be much that Democrats can still learn from Obama, and much that Republicans may find they need to unlearn from Trump.
