The Gift Barack Obama Gave to Donald Trump

This excerpt is running in TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

The optimism and euphoria that was so widespread when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 has long ago soured. Both in international relations and in the virulent politics that has erupted since 2016 in almost all the older democracies and many of the newer ones as well, we find ourselves today in truly baleful circumstances. 

Tracing this history is the focus of my new book After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke our World. My central concern is on paths not taken, choices made or forgone by political leaders that closed off better options and made our current circumstance if not inevitable much more likely. It is not a twenty-twenty hindsight book. The decisions I examine were made in defiance of credible alternatives that were being pressed at the time by serious people inside and outside of government. “Barack Obama’s gift to Donald Trump” is significant not only for its account of U.S. political dynamics in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, but also because Obama’s approach became the template for many other democratic governments, with similar results, that I discuss  elsewhere in the book.