theguardian--2020-11-21--Can American democracy survive Donald Trump?

“ I WON THE ELECTION !
” Donald Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020 , 10 days after he lost the election .
At the same time , Atlantic magazine announced an interview with Barack Obama , in which he warns that the US is “ entering into an epistemological crisis ” – a crisis of knowing .
“ If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what ’ s true from what ’ s false , ” Obama explains , “ by definition our democracy doesn ’ t work.
” I saw the two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ finishing writing this essay , and together they demonstrate its proposition : that American democracy is facing not merely a crisis in trust , but in knowledge itself , largely because language has become increasingly untethered from reality , as we find ourselves in a swirling maelstrom of lies , disinformation , paranoia and conspiracy theories .
The problem is exemplified by Trump ’ s utterance , which bears only the most tenuous relation to reality : Trump participated in an election , giving his declaration some contextual force , but he had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ claim farcical to those who reject it .
The capital letters make it even funnier , a failed tyrant trying to exert mastery through typography .
But it stops being funny when we acknowledge that millions of people accept this lie as a decree .
Their sheer volume creates a crisis in knowing , because truth-claims largely depend on consensual agreement .
This is why the debates about the US ’ s alarming political situation have orbited so magnetically around language itself .
For months , American political and historical commentators have disputed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ called “ fascist ” , whether in refusing to concede he is trying to effect a “ coup ” .
Are these the right words to use to describe reality ?
Not knowing reflects a crisis of knowledge , which derives in part from a crisis in authority .
However , the very fact that we need to ask this question helps answer it – for lying , paranoia and conspiracy are also defining features of the totalitarian societies to which American society ’ s resemblance is being so hotly contested .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Brief History of Fascist Lies : “ As facts are presented as ‘ fake news ’ and ideas originating among those who deny the facts become government policy , we must remember that current talk about ‘ post-truth ’ has a political and intellectual lineage : the history of fascist lying.
” Both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt , two of history ’ s most acute observers of totalitarianism , situated lying squarely at the heart of the totalitarian project .
Not just the Hitlerian big lie of propaganda , but a culture @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ lying as a way of life ” and “ lying on principle ” , systematic dishonesty that destroys the collective space of historical-factual reality .
Orwell similarly insisted that lying is “ integral to totalitarianism ” : indeed , for Orwell , totalitarianism probably “ demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth ” .
And as Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism , both the Nazis and the Soviets created markedly paranoid societies , in which the capillary action of conspiratorial fictions did as much work as ideological @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Orwell warned in his 1946 essay “ The Prevention of Literature ” , “ when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial : that is , when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.
” The flagrancy is part of the point .
At present , that flagrantly artificial power in the US depends on a president who refuses to concede , an administration that repudiates the results of an election that was transparently fair ( as corroborated by independent international election observers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or actively encouraging these falsehoods and surrogates who flatly lie about the election outcome .
The result is that some 70 % of Republican voters currently believe that Biden ’ s win was “ rigged ” – although they don ’ t explain how a Republican Senate was returned in this same “ rigged ” election .
The Republican party , funded by vastly wealthy donors , has turned itself into America ’ s ruling class , clinging to fraudulent power by refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of its opponents , withholding the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for democracy to function .
There is a simple reason for this : minority rule .
As Fintan O ’ Toole recently argued in the New York Review of Books : “ The logic is not that a permanently minority party may move toward authoritarianism but that it must .
Holding power against the wishes of most citizens is an innately despotic act.
” Abraham Lincoln pointed out the same thing in his first inaugural address in 1861 , a month before America plunged into a civil war : “ A majority held @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments , is the only true sovereign of a free people .
Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism .
Unanimity is impossible .
The rule of a minority , as a permanent arrangement , is wholly inadmissible ; so that , rejecting the majority principle , anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.
” The Republicans need to establish the rule of a minority as a permanent arrangement , or they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ defeat by the majority , but their own .
Lindsey Graham , the South Carolina senator who was re-elected last week in an election whose results he disputes in self-cancelling terms , put it clearly : “ If we don ’ t challenge and change the US election system , there will never be another Republican president elected again .
President Trump should not concede.
” This is not news to the Republican leadership .
It ’ s why for decades they have engaged in wholesale repudiation of facts and reality , replacing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Part of what upholds a flagrantly artificial power structure is fraudulent history : “ From the totalitarian point of view , ” as Orwell noted , “ history is something to be created rather than learned.
” We are watching the Republican party create such a fraudulent history in real time .
This is not merely doctrinal , although in part it reflects a leadership coterie that has spent decades building deep partisan loyalty to itself per se , rather than to any specific policies or values it might uphold .
Republicanism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ideology .
But as Arendt observed , it was not ideological “ indoctrination ” that defined totalitarian lies , but rather “ the incapacity or unwillingness to distinguish altogether between fact and opinion ” .
The same night that Trump tweeted he had won the election , Fox News host Jesse Watters told a guest he believed “ that Joe Biden was installed … I can ’ t prove this allegation .
It ’ s a gut feeling.
” The big lie provides a substitute for unsatisfactory reality , a collective delusion that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comprehension .
It is not content with attacking individual facts , but seeks to create an alternative social fantasy that placates its believers while empowering the liars .
As historian Robert Paxton observed : “ Feelings propel fascism more than thought does.
” These fraudulent histories and distorted conspiracies rely on misinformation and “ gut feeling ” .
In a recent interview , Tommy Tuberville , the incoming Republican senator from Alabama , declared that a Biden presidency worried him because his father , a soldier , fought in the second world war @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Meanwhile incoming Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene subscribes to QAnon , the far-right conspiracy theory claiming that a cabal of Satan-worshiping , paedophiliac sex-trafficking Democrats has been plotting against Trump .
As the New York Times reported last year : “ At Christian nationalist gatherings and strategy meetings , the Democratic party and its supporters are routinely described as ‘ demonic ’ and associated with ‘ rulers of the darkness ’ .
” Republicans no longer oppose Democrats politically : they are opposing them existentially .
As Arendt understood , in its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ is a form of action ” .
In this sense , lies are what the linguist JL Austin called “ performative ” utterances , statements that can transform social reality instead of merely describing it – but only under rigidly defined circumstances .
When a judge says “ guilty as charged ” , the defendant ’ s life changes , but only if they ’ re both in a courtroom under the ritualised conditions of “ due process ” .
If a judge says it at home watching a legal drama , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is why it was so absurd when Trump tweeted during the election , “ I hereby claim Massachusetts ” – because none of the conditions that would give that statement performative force had been met .
He was just an old man shouting at clouds .
But when he pronounces “ I WON THE ELECTION !
” he is trying to imbue his claim performatively with the symbolic authority of his office .
That authority depends entirely on collective recognition .
It matters that most world leaders have now “ recognised ” Joe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ society ’ s acceptance is what gives language performative power .
In 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter identified what he called the “ paranoid style in American politics ” , a perspective that shaped the stories Americans too often told themselves .
Paranoia offers a master trope for interpreting “ the sense of heated exaggeration , suspiciousness , and conspiratorial fantasy ” in American political narratives , from 18th-century Illuminati paranoia to the Papist conspiracies of 19th-century nativism , to the enduring anti-communist hysterias of the 20th century .
Hofstadter predicted that paranoid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when “ historical catastrophes or frustrations ” exacerbated the religious traditions and social structures that fostered those energies , catalysing them into “ mass movements or political parties ” .
Half a century later America produced a president who embodies the paranoid style , proclaiming at every turn that investigations into his allegedly criminal activity are “ witch-hunts ” , that elections are “ rigged ” against him , while spinning false conspiracy theories as camouflage , so that none of them seem real , or all of them do .
As Arendt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world , people arrive at the point “ where they would , at the same time , believe everything and nothing , think that everything was possible and that nothing was true ” .
Conspiracy theories are the authoritarian answer to paranoia ; everything is equally possible , but an authority remains in control .
This makes conspiracy more comforting than contingency , especially if you find authority reassuring .
Conspiracy and paranoia insist there is always a plot , and every plot has an author : someone is always in charge , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you don ’ t like .
Especially if it ’ s a person you don ’ t like , because then you have someone to blame .
Paranoid narratives are inherently narcissistic as well as authoritarian .
Paranoia rejects the proportionality of pluralism , in which the world ’ s indifference to you is a sign of its multiplicity , and interprets that indifference as malice .
The world is not unmoved by your existence , but upholds your central importance : even your refrigerator is spying on you .
A paranoid system @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the game is rigged against you– and that the world cares enough to bother disempowering you .
Some of the “ religious traditions ” Hofstadter identified feed into this paranoia .
Orwell detected a strong family resemblance between totalitarianism and theocracy : “ A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy , and its ruling caste , in order to keep its position , has to be thought of as infallible.
” Paintings of Trump in the hands of Jesus that circulated during his presidency struck non-believers as absurd , not least because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but were admired in all seriousness by the devout .
Mike Pence is hailed by rightwing Christian leaders as the “ model ” of an “ evangelical politician ” , a label that controverts the constitution ’ s establishing separation of church and state .
Trump ’ s attorney general William Barr is a crusading religious zealot , avowing the centrality of Christian nationalism to American life .
He has said the “ moral order ” of the United States can only be based on “ a transcendent Supreme Being ” , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ authoritarian politics .
Trump has spent four years exerting political power to make reality conform to his every assertion .
This is both a theocratic performance , and a totalitarian one .
The more deranged the assertion , the better it served his purpose : the statements had to be wildly detached from reality , so as to make clear his power to bend reality toward his word .
Godlike Trump pronounced , and people scrambled to make it real – or to appear real .
That was the essence of “ Sharpiegate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ weather map did not conform to Trump ’ s description of Hurricane Dorian ’ s path .
Having crudely altered the map with a Sharpie pen , Trump insisted that official records be altered to conform to his claims .
As philosophers of language have pointed out , the crudity was not an error , it was the point .
Trump was not aiming to deceive , he was performing divine fiat : make it so .
This is precisely the process of “ rectifying ” official records that Orwell describes in Nineteen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Literature ” two years earlier he ’ d noted that “ totalitarianism demands , in fact , the continuous alteration of the past ” .
For Elias Canetti , paranoid and totalitarian systems created conspiratorial fictions reflecting “ a disease of power ” , a narcissistic , compulsive need to destroy the world as proof of that power : “ To be the last man to remain alive is the deepest urge of every seeker after power … Once he feels himself threatened his passionate desire to see everyone lying dead before him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” “ Mastery ” here is critical : the strongman has to perform his strength not merely over his opponents , but over language and narrative , so that he can alter reality at will .
Canetti was writing about a German judge named Daniel Schreber , who became Freud ’ s most famous case study for paranoia .
In his 1997 study of Schreber , My Own Private Germany , Eric Santner argued that paranoia derives from a symbolic crisis in authority , and described the ways in which Schreber ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Nazi Germany .
“ Where there is a culture of paranoia , ” Santner concluded , “ fascism of one kind or another may not be far behind.
” Over the last four years , many have acknowledged , however reluctantly , the ways in which Trump ’ s presidency is symptomatic of entrenched maladies in the American body politic : his divisiveness , rage , dishonesty , greed , double-dealing , dishonour , puerility , truculence , fragility , narcissism and paranoia , all characterise American society today .
Trump ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rules apply to everyone but him .
Trump is all of America ’ s worst qualities , the nation ’ s id come to roaring life .
If Trump is symptomatic of America ’ s diseases of power , then his compulsive dishonesty might be the most revealing pathology of all .
The US is a chronically untruthful country , deceit written into its very framework .
The constitution contains explicit protections of slavery but never uses the word “ slavery ” , a deeply mendacious deception that eventually became a collective self-deception @ @ @ @ @ @ @ truths to be self-evident , that all men are created equal ” was written by a man who enslaved men he did not consider his equal , and became the foundation of a country that incessantly declared its belief in truth and justice while enslaving and oppressing much of its population .
Like many Americans , I have spent four years struggling against a pathological liar in the White House , only to realise , belatedly , that American culture fetishises the truth for a reason .
“ We hold these truths ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the American way ” , the fable of the boy George Washington insisting he can not tell a lie , “ Honest Abe ” Lincoln : this is a society protesting too much .
American history is riddled with lies : that we talk about truth so much is just a tell .
After the civil war freed the slaves , the white south immediately passed laws to disenfranchise black Americans , and then wrote stories – historical fiction and “ histories ” that were fiction – to justify its betrayals of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fiction even had a title – “ The Lost Cause ” – which it acquired from the novels of Sir Walter Scott .
The Lost Cause was perhaps the most powerful conspiracy theory of all , spinning a consoling , coherent romance out of a brutally incoherent historical reality .
The Lost Cause was designed to offer a way for the white south to save face after its humiliating defeat , maintaining that the north was to blame for the civil war , which wasn ’ t really fought to defend slavery .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , deepening the divisions over which the war was fought , rather than healing them .
Now the US appears set to repeat exactly the same mistake , enabling Trump voters – and Trump himself – to create a fiction claiming they didn ’ t actually lose the 2020 election .
“ The legal operation is designed for Trump to save face , ” a White House source reportedly said : “ It ’ s meant to give him an avenue to leave in the best possible way.
” It has often been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into existence ; less often remarked is the corollary , that America is , in a very real sense , merely a story the nation tells itself .
That makes the US singularly subject to the meanings of words , to the fetishised language of the founding documents .
But now it is a country arguing that a constitutional amendment beginning with the words “ well-regulated ” prohibits regulation , one whose supreme court ruled that a corporation is the same as an individual .
This is Humpty Dumpty through the looking glass @ @ @ @ @ @ @ says they mean .
“ The question , ” as Humpty tells Alice , is “ which is to be master – that ’ s all.
” When we lose track of whose version of a story to trust , paranoia ensues .
It seems no coincidence that we find ourselves in an epistemological crisis several years into what is frequently described as a “ crisis in the humanities ” , the very subjects that devote themselves to epistemological systems : language , literature , history , philosophy .
The destruction of epistemological @ @ @ @ @ @ @ For Arendt , imagination is where politics lives : the capacity to imagine ourselves as other than we are is the predicate both for lying and for political action .
Democracy is the politics of the possible , rather than of the inevitable or coercive .
Political and cultural rhetoric creates the conditions for its own realisation : thus we can only save ourselves if we tell the truth .
Democracy relies on foundations of shared truths , because the social contract depends on mutual trust .
“ This is not who we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his campaign .
To a certain extent we are what we do , not who we say we are ( “ action is character , ” as F Scott Fitzgerald once observed ) .
But performative language complicates that distinction .
In insisting “ This is not who we are ” , Biden also creates the conditions to change who we are , to become who we say we wish to be .

“I WON THE ELECTION!” Donald Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020, 10 days after he lost the election. At the same time, Atlantic magazine announced an interview with Barack Obama, in which he warns that the US is “entering into an epistemological crisis” – a crisis of knowing. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false,” Obama explains, “by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” I saw the two assertions juxtaposed on Twitter as I was finishing writing this essay, and together they demonstrate its proposition: that American democracy is facing not merely a crisis in trust, but in knowledge itself, largely because language has become increasingly untethered from reality, as we find ourselves in a swirling maelstrom of lies, disinformation, paranoia and conspiracy theories.
The problem is exemplified by Trump’s utterance, which bears only the most tenuous relation to reality: Trump participated in an election, giving his declaration some contextual force, but he had not won the election, rendering the claim farcical to those who reject it. The capital letters make it even funnier, a failed tyrant trying to exert mastery through typography. But it stops being funny when we acknowledge that millions of people accept this lie as a decree. Their sheer volume creates a crisis in knowing, because truth-claims largely depend on consensual agreement. This is why the debates about the US’s alarming political situation have orbited so magnetically around language itself. For months, American political and historical commentators have disputed whether the Trump administration can be properly called “fascist”, whether in refusing to concede he is trying to effect a “coup”. Are these the right words to use to describe reality? Not knowing reflects a crisis of knowledge, which derives in part from a crisis in authority.
However, the very fact that we need to ask this question helps answer it – for lying, paranoia and conspiracy are also defining features of the totalitarian societies to which American society’s resemblance is being so hotly contested. As Federico Finchelstein maintained in his recent A Brief History of Fascist Lies: “As facts are presented as ‘fake news’ and ideas originating among those who deny the facts become government policy, we must remember that current talk about ‘post-truth’ has a political and intellectual lineage: the history of fascist lying.” Both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, two of history’s most acute observers of totalitarianism, situated lying squarely at the heart of the totalitarian project. Not just the Hitlerian big lie of propaganda, but a culture of pervasive lying, what Arendt called “lying as a way of life” and “lying on principle”, systematic dishonesty that destroys the collective space of historical-factual reality. Orwell similarly insisted that lying is “integral to totalitarianism”: indeed, for Orwell, totalitarianism probably “demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth”. And as Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, both the Nazis and the Soviets created markedly paranoid societies, in which the capillary action of conspiratorial fictions did as much work as ideological infrastructure.
Trump supporters in Las Vegas protest the election result on 8 November. Photograph: John Locher/AP
“A society becomes totalitarian,” Orwell warned in his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature”, “when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” The flagrancy is part of the point. At present, that flagrantly artificial power in the US depends on a president who refuses to concede, an administration that repudiates the results of an election that was transparently fair (as corroborated by independent international election observers), the Republican leadership complicitly silent or actively encouraging these falsehoods and surrogates who flatly lie about the election outcome. The result is that some 70% of Republican voters currently believe that Biden’s win was “rigged” – although they don’t explain how a Republican Senate was returned in this same “rigged” election. The Republican party, funded by vastly wealthy donors, has turned itself into America’s ruling class, clinging to fraudulent power by refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of its opponents, withholding the consent of the loser that is necessary for democracy to function.
There is a simple reason for this: minority rule. As Fintan O’Toole recently argued in the New York Review of Books: “The logic is not that a permanently minority party may move toward authoritarianism but that it must. Holding power against the wishes of most citizens is an innately despotic act.” Abraham Lincoln pointed out the same thing in his first inaugural address in 1861, a month before America plunged into a civil war: “A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.” The Republicans need to establish the rule of a minority as a permanent arrangement, or they must concede not Trump’s inevitable defeat by the majority, but their own. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who was re-elected last week in an election whose results he disputes in self-cancelling terms, put it clearly: “If we don’t challenge and change the US election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again. President Trump should not concede.”
This is not news to the Republican leadership. It’s why for decades they have engaged in wholesale repudiation of facts and reality, replacing evidence and history with lies and paranoia. Part of what upholds a flagrantly artificial power structure is fraudulent history: “From the totalitarian point of view,” as Orwell noted, “history is something to be created rather than learned.” We are watching the Republican party create such a fraudulent history in real time. This is not merely doctrinal, although in part it reflects a leadership coterie that has spent decades building deep partisan loyalty to itself per se, rather than to any specific policies or values it might uphold. Republicanism in America today has become its own ideology. But as Arendt observed, it was not ideological “indoctrination” that defined totalitarian lies, but rather “the incapacity or unwillingness to distinguish altogether between fact and opinion”. The same night that Trump tweeted he had won the election, Fox News host Jesse Watters told a guest he believed “that Joe Biden was installed … I can’t prove this allegation. It’s a gut feeling.” The big lie provides a substitute for unsatisfactory reality, a collective delusion that fills in the gaps between power and comprehension. It is not content with attacking individual facts, but seeks to create an alternative social fantasy that placates its believers while empowering the liars. As historian Robert Paxton observed: “Feelings propel fascism more than thought does.”
Conspiracy claims are the authoritarian answer to paranoia; everything is possible, but an authority remains in control
These fraudulent histories and distorted conspiracies rely on misinformation and “gut feeling”. In a recent interview, Tommy Tuberville, the incoming Republican senator from Alabama, declared that a Biden presidency worried him because his father, a soldier, fought in the second world war to “free Europe of socialism”. Meanwhile incoming Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene subscribes to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory claiming that a cabal of Satan-worshiping, paedophiliac sex-trafficking Democrats has been plotting against Trump. As the New York Times reported last year: “At Christian nationalist gatherings and strategy meetings, the Democratic party and its supporters are routinely described as ‘demonic’ and associated with ‘rulers of the darkness’.” Republicans no longer oppose Democrats politically: they are opposing them existentially.
As Arendt understood, in its attempt to change the record, lying “is a form of action”. In this sense, lies are what the linguist JL Austin called “performative” utterances, statements that can transform social reality instead of merely describing it – but only under rigidly defined circumstances. When a judge says “guilty as charged”, the defendant’s life changes, but only if they’re both in a courtroom under the ritualised conditions of “due process”. If a judge says it at home watching a legal drama, the statement has no effect. This is why it was so absurd when Trump tweeted during the election, “I hereby claim Massachusetts” – because none of the conditions that would give that statement performative force had been met. He was just an old man shouting at clouds. But when he pronounces “I WON THE ELECTION!” he is trying to imbue his claim performatively with the symbolic authority of his office. That authority depends entirely on collective recognition. It matters that most world leaders have now “recognised” Joe Biden as America’s president-elect: society’s acceptance is what gives language performative power.
In 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter identified what he called the “paranoid style in American politics”, a perspective that shaped the stories Americans too often told themselves. Paranoia offers a master trope for interpreting “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” in American political narratives, from 18th-century Illuminati paranoia to the Papist conspiracies of 19th-century nativism, to the enduring anti-communist hysterias of the 20th century. Hofstadter predicted that paranoid energies would periodically be released in America when “historical catastrophes or frustrations” exacerbated the religious traditions and social structures that fostered those energies, catalysing them into “mass movements or political parties”.
Half a century later America produced a president who embodies the paranoid style, proclaiming at every turn that investigations into his allegedly criminal activity are “witch-hunts”, that elections are “rigged” against him, while spinning false conspiracy theories as camouflage, so that none of them seem real, or all of them do. As Arendt observed, in an unstable, incomprehensible world, people arrive at the point “where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true”.
Conspiracy theories are the authoritarian answer to paranoia; everything is equally possible, but an authority remains in control. This makes conspiracy more comforting than contingency, especially if you find authority reassuring. Conspiracy and paranoia insist there is always a plot, and every plot has an author: someone is always in charge, even if it’s a person you don’t like. Especially if it’s a person you don’t like, because then you have someone to blame.
Paranoid narratives are inherently narcissistic as well as authoritarian. Paranoia rejects the proportionality of pluralism, in which the world’s indifference to you is a sign of its multiplicity, and interprets that indifference as malice. The world is not unmoved by your existence, but upholds your central importance: even your refrigerator is spying on you. A paranoid system confirms that your powerlessness is only because the game is rigged against you– and that the world cares enough to bother disempowering you.
A sign of anti-Trump sentiment in Racine, Wisconsin. Photograph: Mark Hertzberg/ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock
Some of the “religious traditions” Hofstadter identified feed into this paranoia. Orwell detected a strong family resemblance between totalitarianism and theocracy: “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.” Paintings of Trump in the hands of Jesus that circulated during his presidency struck non-believers as absurd, not least because of the profanely immoral life he leads, but were admired in all seriousness by the devout. Mike Pence is hailed by rightwing Christian leaders as the “model” of an “evangelical politician”, a label that controverts the constitution’s establishing separation of church and state. Trump’s attorney general William Barr is a crusading religious zealot, avowing the centrality of Christian nationalism to American life. He has said the “moral order” of the United States can only be based on “a transcendent Supreme Being”, a belief that leads naturally to an authoritarian politics.
Trump has spent four years exerting political power to make reality conform to his every assertion. This is both a theocratic performance, and a totalitarian one. The more deranged the assertion, the better it served his purpose: the statements had to be wildly detached from reality, so as to make clear his power to bend reality toward his word. Godlike Trump pronounced, and people scrambled to make it real – or to appear real. That was the essence of “Sharpiegate”, for example, when a weather map did not conform to Trump’s description of Hurricane Dorian’s path. Having crudely altered the map with a Sharpie pen, Trump insisted that official records be altered to conform to his claims. As philosophers of language have pointed out, the crudity was not an error, it was the point. Trump was not aiming to deceive, he was performing divine fiat: make it so. This is precisely the process of “rectifying” official records that Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four; in “The Prevention of Literature” two years earlier he’d noted that “totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past”.
American culture fetishises the truth for a reason ... our history is riddled with lies: that we talk about truth so much is just a tell
For Elias Canetti, paranoid and totalitarian systems created conspiratorial fictions reflecting “a disease of power”, a narcissistic, compulsive need to destroy the world as proof of that power: “To be the last man to remain alive is the deepest urge of every seeker after power … Once he feels himself threatened his passionate desire to see everyone lying dead before him can scarcely be mastered by his reason.” “Mastery” here is critical: the strongman has to perform his strength not merely over his opponents, but over language and narrative, so that he can alter reality at will.
Canetti was writing about a German judge named Daniel Schreber, who became Freud’s most famous case study for paranoia. In his 1997 study of Schreber, My Own Private Germany, Eric Santner argued that paranoia derives from a symbolic crisis in authority, and described the ways in which Schreber’s paranoia seemed to anticipate the paranoid culture of Nazi Germany. “Where there is a culture of paranoia,” Santner concluded, “fascism of one kind or another may not be far behind.”
Over the last four years, many have acknowledged, however reluctantly, the ways in which Trump’s presidency is symptomatic of entrenched maladies in the American body politic: his divisiveness, rage, dishonesty, greed, double-dealing, dishonour, puerility, truculence, fragility, narcissism and paranoia, all characterise American society today. Trump’s exceptionalism is also American: the rules apply to everyone but him. Trump is all of America’s worst qualities, the nation’s id come to roaring life.
If Trump is symptomatic of America’s diseases of power, then his compulsive dishonesty might be the most revealing pathology of all. The US is a chronically untruthful country, deceit written into its very framework. The constitution contains explicit protections of slavery but never uses the word “slavery”, a deeply mendacious deception that eventually became a collective self-deception. The declaration “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” was written by a man who enslaved men he did not consider his equal, and became the foundation of a country that incessantly declared its belief in truth and justice while enslaving and oppressing much of its population.
Like many Americans, I have spent four years struggling against a pathological liar in the White House, only to realise, belatedly, that American culture fetishises the truth for a reason. “We hold these truths”, “truth, justice, and the American way”, the fable of the boy George Washington insisting he cannot tell a lie, “Honest Abe” Lincoln: this is a society protesting too much. American history is riddled with lies: that we talk about truth so much is just a tell.
After the civil war freed the slaves, the white south immediately passed laws to disenfranchise black Americans, and then wrote stories – historical fiction and “histories” that were fiction – to justify its betrayals of the laws it had ostensibly passed. That fiction even had a title – “The Lost Cause” – which it acquired from the novels of Sir Walter Scott. The Lost Cause was perhaps the most powerful conspiracy theory of all, spinning a consoling, coherent romance out of a brutally incoherent historical reality. The Lost Cause was designed to offer a way for the white south to save face after its humiliating defeat, maintaining that the north was to blame for the civil war, which wasn’t really fought to defend slavery. This self-serving myth has had profound consequences, deepening the divisions over which the war was fought, rather than healing them.
‘This is not who we are’ … President-elect Joe Biden. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Now the US appears set to repeat exactly the same mistake, enabling Trump voters – and Trump himself – to create a fiction claiming they didn’t actually lose the 2020 election. “The legal operation is designed for Trump to save face,” a White House source reportedly said: “It’s meant to give him an avenue to leave in the best possible way.”
It has often been said that America had to imagine itself into existence; less often remarked is the corollary, that America is, in a very real sense, merely a story the nation tells itself. That makes the US singularly subject to the meanings of words, to the fetishised language of the founding documents. But now it is a country arguing that a constitutional amendment beginning with the words “well-regulated” prohibits regulation, one whose supreme court ruled that a corporation is the same as an individual. This is Humpty Dumpty through the looking glass, proclaiming that words mean whatever he says they mean. “The question,” as Humpty tells Alice, is “which is to be master – that’s all.”
When we lose track of whose version of a story to trust, paranoia ensues. It seems no coincidence that we find ourselves in an epistemological crisis several years into what is frequently described as a “crisis in the humanities”, the very subjects that devote themselves to epistemological systems: language, literature, history, philosophy. The destruction of epistemological foundations creates the crisis in knowledge.
For Arendt, imagination is where politics lives: the capacity to imagine ourselves as other than we are is the predicate both for lying and for political action. Democracy is the politics of the possible, rather than of the inevitable or coercive. Political and cultural rhetoric creates the conditions for its own realisation: thus we can only save ourselves if we tell the truth. Democracy relies on foundations of shared truths, because the social contract depends on mutual trust. “This is not who we are,” Joe Biden repeated throughout his campaign. To a certain extent we are what we do, not who we say we are (“action is character,” as F Scott Fitzgerald once observed). But performative language complicates that distinction. In insisting “This is not who we are”, Biden also creates the conditions to change who we are, to become who we say we wish to be.


theguardian--2020-11-21--Barack Obama on the moment he won the presidency – exclusive extract

More than anything campaign-related , it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October ’ s waning days .
My sister Maya called , saying the doctors didn ’ t think Toot [ Obama ’ s grandmother ] would last much longer , perhaps no more than a week .
She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment , under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs .
Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening , asking for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ glass of wine and a cigarette , she was now slipping in and out of consciousness .
And so , 12 days before the election , I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye .
Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot ’ s apartment ; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters .
“ I thought you might want to take some back with you , ” she said .
I picked up a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother , laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite .
Me at the age of four or five , riding on Gramps ’ s shoulders as waves splashed around us .
The four of us with Maya , still a toddler , smiling in front of a Christmas tree .
Taking the chair beside the bed , I held my grandmother ’ s hand in mine .
Her body had wasted away and her breathing was labored .
Every so often , she ’ d be shaken by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like a grinding of gears .
A few times , she murmured softly , although the words , if any , escaped me .
What dreams might she be having ?
I wondered if she ’ d been able to look back and take stock , or whether she ’ d consider that too much of an indulgence .
I wanted to think that she did look back ; that she ’ d reveled in the memory of a long-ago lover or a perfect , sunlit day in her youth when she ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the world had revealed itself to be big and full of promise .
I thought back to a conversation I ’ d had with her when I was in high school , around the time that her chronic back problems began making it difficult for her to walk for long stretches .
“ The thing about getting old , Bar , ” Toot had told me , “ is that you ’ re the same person inside.
” I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals , as if to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ You ’ re trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart .
But it ’ s still you .
You understand ?
” For the next hour or so , I sat talking to Maya about her work and her family , all the while stroking Toot ’ s dry , bony hand .
But eventually the room felt too crowded with memories – colliding , merging , refracting , like images in a kaleidoscope – and I told Maya I wanted to take a quick walk outside .
After consulting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ] and my Secret Service detail , it was agreed that the press pool downstairs would not be informed , and I took the elevator to the basement level and went out through the garage , turning left down the narrow street that ran behind my grandparents ’ apartment building .
The street had barely changed in 35 years .
I passed the rear of a small Shinto temple and community center , then rows of wooden homes broken up by the occasional three-story concrete apartment building .
I had bounced my first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when I was 10 years old – down this street , dribbling the length of the uneven sidewalk on my way to and from the courts at the nearby elementary school .
Toot used to say that she always knew when I was coming home for dinner because she could hear that darn ball bouncing from 10 stories up .
I had run down this street to the supermarket to buy her cigarettes , motivated by her promise that I could buy a candy bar with the change if I was back in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was 15 , I ’ d walk this same street home from a shift at my first job , scooping ice-cream at the Baskin-Robbins around the corner , Toot laughing heartily when I grumbled to her about my paltry paycheck .
Another time .
Another life .
Modest and without consequence to the rest of the world .
But one that had given me love .
Once Toot was gone , there would be no one left who remembered that life , or remembered me in it .
I heard a stampede of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had somehow gotten wind of my unscheduled excursion and were gathering on the sidewalk across the street , cameramen jostling to set up their shots , reporters with microphones looking at me awkwardly , clearly conflicted about shouting a question .
They were decent about it , really just doing their jobs , and anyway I had barely traveled four blocks .
I gave the press a quick wave and turned around to go back to the garage .
There was no point in going farther , I realized ; what I was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I left Hawaii and went back to work .
Eight days later , on the eve of the election , Maya called to say Toot had died .
It was my last day of campaigning .
We were scheduled to be in North Carolina that evening , before flying to Virginia for our final event .
Before heading to the venue , Axe [ chief campaign strategist David Axelrod ] asked me gently if I needed help writing a topper to my usual campaign remarks , to briefly acknowledge my grandmother ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no .
I knew what I wanted to say .
It was a beautiful night , cool with a light rain .
Standing on the outdoor stage , after the music and cheers and chants had died down , I spent a few minutes telling the crowd about Toot – how she ’ d grown up during the Depression and worked on an assembly line while Gramps was away in the war , what she had meant to our family , what she might mean to them .
“ She was one of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ across America , ” I said .
“ They ’ re not famous .
Their names aren ’ t in the newspapers .
But each and every day they work hard .
They look after their families .
They sacrifice for their children and their grandchildren .
They aren ’ t seeking the limelight – all they try to do is just do the right thing .
“ And in this crowd , there are a lot of quiet heroes like that – mothers and fathers , grandparents , who have worked hard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the satisfaction that they get is seeing that their children and maybe their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren live a better life than they did .
“ That ’ s what America ’ s about .
That ’ s what we ’ re fighting for.
” It was as good a closing argument for the campaign as I felt that I could give .
If you ’ re the candidate , Election Day brings a surprising stillness .
There are no more rallies or town halls .
TV and radio ads no longer matter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ report .
Campaign offices empty as staff and volunteers hit the streets to help turn out voters .
Across the country millions of strangers step behind a black curtain to register their policy preferences and private instincts , as some mysterious collective alchemy determines the country ’ s fate – and your own .
The realization is obvious but also profound : it ’ s out of your hands now .
Pretty much all you can do is wait .
Plouffe [ campaign manager David Plouffe ] and Axe were driven crazy by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ BlackBerrys scrounging for field reports , rumors , bad weather – anything that might be taken as a data point .
I took the opposite tack , giving myself over to uncertainty as one might lie back and float over a wave .
I did start the morning by calling into a round of drive-time radio shows , mostly at Black stations , reminding people to get out and vote .
Around 7.30 , Michelle and I cast our votes at the Beulah Shoesmith elementary school , a few blocks from our home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sasha with us and sending them on to school after that .
I then made a quick trip to Indianapolis to visit a field office and shake hands with voters .
Later , I played basketball ( a superstition Reggie [ personal aide Reggie Love ] and I had developed after we played the morning of the Iowa caucus but failed to play the day of the New Hampshire primary ) with Michelle ’ s brother Craig , some old buddies and a handful of my friends ’ sons who were fast and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hard .
It was a competitive game , filled with the usual good-natured trash talk , although I noticed an absence of hard fouls .
This was per Craig ’ s orders , I learned later , since he knew his sister would hold him accountable if I came home with a black eye .
Gibbs , meanwhile , was tracking news from the battleground states , reporting that turnout appeared to be shattering records across the country , creating problems in some polling places as voters waited four or five hours to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ scenes , Gibbs said , showed people more jubilant than frustrated , with seniors in lawn chairs and volunteers passing out refreshments as if they were all at a neighborhood block party .
I spent the rest of the afternoon at home , puttering around uselessly while Michelle and the girls got their hair done .
Alone in my study , I made a point of editing the drafts of both my victory and concession speeches .
Around 8pm , Axe called to say that the networks had called Pennsylvania in our favor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nicholson ] said we should start heading to the downtown hotel where we ’ d be watching the returns before moving over to the public gathering at Grant Park .
Outside the front gate of our house , the number of Secret Service agents and vehicles seemed to have doubled over the past few hours .
The head of my detail , Jeff Gilbert , shook my hand and pulled me into a brief embrace .
It was unseasonably warm for Chicago at that time of year , almost in the mid-60s , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Drive , Michelle and I were quiet , staring out the window at Lake Michigan , listening to the girls horsing around in the back seat .
Suddenly Malia turned to me and asked , “ Daddy , did you win ?
” “ And we ’ re supposed to be going to the big party to celebrate ?
” “ That ’ s right .
Why do you ask ?
” “ Well , it doesn ’ t seem like that many people might be coming to the party , ’ cause @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” I laughed , realizing my daughter was right ; save for our motorcade , the six lanes in both directions were completely empty .
Security had changed at the hotel as well , with armed Swat teams deployed in the stairwells .
Our family and closest friends were already in the suite , everyone smiling , kids racing around the room , and yet the atmosphere was still strangely muted , as if the reality of what was about to happen hadn ’ t yet settled in their minds .
My mother-in-law @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of being relaxed ; through the din , I noticed her sitting on the couch , her eyes fixed on the television , her expression one of disbelief .
I tried to imagine what she must be thinking , having grown up just a few miles away during a time when there were still many Chicago neighborhoods that Blacks could not even safely enter ; a time when office work was out of reach for most Blacks , and her father , unable to get a union card from white-controlled trade unions , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an itinerant tradesman ; a time when the thought of a Black US president would have seemed as far-fetched as a pig taking flight .
I took a seat next to her on the couch .
“ You OK ?
” I asked .
Marian shrugged and kept staring at the television .
She said , “ This is kind of too much.
” “ I know.
” I took her hand and squeezed it , the two of us sitting in companionable silence for a few minutes .
Then suddenly a shot @ @ @ @ @ @ @ TV screen and ABC News announced that I would be the 44th president of the United States .
The room erupted .
Shouts could be heard up and down the hall .
Michelle and I kissed , and she pulled back gently to give me the once-over as she laughed and shook her head .
Reggie and Marvin rushed in to give everyone big bear hugs .
Soon Plouffe , Axe and Gibbs walked in , and I indulged them for several minutes as they rattled off state-by-state results before telling them what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as much as anything I ’ d done , it was their skill , hard work , insight , tenacity , loyalty and heart , along with the commitment of the entire team , that had made this moment possible .
The rest of the night is mostly a blur to me now .
I remember John McCain ’ s phone call , which was as gracious as his concession speech .
He emphasized how proud America should be of the history that had been made and pledged to help me succeed .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and several foreign leaders , and a conversation with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi , both of whose caucuses had had very good nights .
I remember meeting Joe Biden ’ s 91-year-old mother , who took pleasure in telling me how she ’ d scolded Joe for even considering not being on the ticket .
More than 200,000 people had gathered in Grant Park that night , the stage facing Chicago ’ s glittering skyline .
I can see in my mind even now some of the faces looking up as I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ children of every race , some wealthy , some poor , some famous and some not , some smiling ecstatically , others openly weeping .
I ’ ve reread lines from my speech that night and heard accounts from staff and friends of what it felt like to be there .
But I worry that my memories of that night , like so much else that ’ s happened these past 12 years , are shaded by the images that I ’ ve seen , the footage of our family walking across the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and lights and magnificent backdrops .
As beautiful as they are , they don ’ t always match the lived experience .
In fact , my favorite photograph from that night isn ’ t of Grant Park at all .
Rather it ’ s one I received many years later as a gift , a photograph of the Lincoln Memorial , taken as I was giving my speech in Chicago .
It shows a small gathering of people on the stairs , their faces obscured by the darkness , and behind them the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ face craggy , his eyes slightly downcast .
They ’ re listening to the radio , I am told , quietly contemplating who we are as a people – and the arc of this thing we call democracy .
• None This is an extract from A Promised Land by Barack Obama , published by Penguin Random House on 17 November at £35 .
To order a copy for £29.75 , go to guardianbookshop.com .

More than anything campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October’s waning days. My sister Maya called, saying the doctors didn’t think Toot [Obama’s grandmother] would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.
And so, 12 days before the election, I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot’s apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. “I thought you might want to take some back with you,” she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Gramps’s shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.
Taking the chair beside the bed, I held my grandmother’s hand in mine. Her body had wasted away and her breathing was labored. Every so often, she’d be shaken by a violent, metallic cough that sounded like a grinding of gears. A few times, she murmured softly, although the words, if any, escaped me.
What dreams might she be having? I wondered if she’d been able to look back and take stock, or whether she’d consider that too much of an indulgence. I wanted to think that she did look back; that she’d reveled in the memory of a long-ago lover or a perfect, sunlit day in her youth when she’d experienced a bit of good fortune and the world had revealed itself to be big and full of promise.
I thought back to a conversation I’d had with her when I was in high school, around the time that her chronic back problems began making it difficult for her to walk for long stretches.
“The thing about getting old, Bar,” Toot had told me, “is that you’re the same person inside.” I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. “You’re trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart. But it’s still you. You understand?”
I did now.
Obama’s high school graduation in Hawaii in 1979, with his grandparents, Madelyn (known as Toot) and Stanley Dunham, who raised him through high school. Photograph: AP Photo/Obama Presidential Campaign
For the next hour or so, I sat talking to Maya about her work and her family, all the while stroking Toot’s dry, bony hand. But eventually the room felt too crowded with memories – colliding, merging, refracting, like images in a kaleidoscope – and I told Maya I wanted to take a quick walk outside. After consulting with Gibbs [communications director Robert Gibbs] and my Secret Service detail, it was agreed that the press pool downstairs would not be informed, and I took the elevator to the basement level and went out through the garage, turning left down the narrow street that ran behind my grandparents’ apartment building.
The street had barely changed in 35 years. I passed the rear of a small Shinto temple and community center, then rows of wooden homes broken up by the occasional three-story concrete apartment building. I had bounced my first basketball – a gift from my father when I was 10 years old – down this street, dribbling the length of the uneven sidewalk on my way to and from the courts at the nearby elementary school. Toot used to say that she always knew when I was coming home for dinner because she could hear that darn ball bouncing from 10 stories up. I had run down this street to the supermarket to buy her cigarettes, motivated by her promise that I could buy a candy bar with the change if I was back in 10 minutes. Later, when I was 15, I’d walk this same street home from a shift at my first job, scooping ice-cream at the Baskin-Robbins around the corner, Toot laughing heartily when I grumbled to her about my paltry paycheck.
Another time. Another life. Modest and without consequence to the rest of the world. But one that had given me love. Once Toot was gone, there would be no one left who remembered that life, or remembered me in it.
I heard a stampede of feet behind me; the press pool had somehow gotten wind of my unscheduled excursion and were gathering on the sidewalk across the street, cameramen jostling to set up their shots, reporters with microphones looking at me awkwardly, clearly conflicted about shouting a question. They were decent about it, really just doing their jobs, and anyway I had barely traveled four blocks. I gave the press a quick wave and turned around to go back to the garage. There was no point in going farther, I realized; what I was looking for was no longer there.
Talking to the media in June 2008, on the campaign trail in Virginia. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters
I left Hawaii and went back to work. Eight days later, on the eve of the election, Maya called to say Toot had died. It was my last day of campaigning. We were scheduled to be in North Carolina that evening, before flying to Virginia for our final event. Before heading to the venue, Axe [chief campaign strategist David Axelrod] asked me gently if I needed help writing a topper to my usual campaign remarks, to briefly acknowledge my grandmother’s death. I thanked him and said no. I knew what I wanted to say.
It was a beautiful night, cool with a light rain. Standing on the outdoor stage, after the music and cheers and chants had died down, I spent a few minutes telling the crowd about Toot – how she’d grown up during the Depression and worked on an assembly line while Gramps was away in the war, what she had meant to our family, what she might mean to them.
“She was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America,” I said. “They’re not famous. Their names aren’t in the newspapers. But each and every day they work hard. They look after their families. They sacrifice for their children and their grandchildren. They aren’t seeking the limelight – all they try to do is just do the right thing.
“And in this crowd, there are a lot of quiet heroes like that – mothers and fathers, grandparents, who have worked hard and sacrificed all their lives. And the satisfaction that they get is seeing that their children and maybe their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren live a better life than they did.
“That’s what America’s about. That’s what we’re fighting for.”
It was as good a closing argument for the campaign as I felt that I could give.
If you’re the candidate, Election Day brings a surprising stillness. There are no more rallies or town halls. TV and radio ads no longer matter; newscasts have nothing of substance to report. Campaign offices empty as staff and volunteers hit the streets to help turn out voters. Across the country millions of strangers step behind a black curtain to register their policy preferences and private instincts, as some mysterious collective alchemy determines the country’s fate – and your own. The realization is obvious but also profound: it’s out of your hands now. Pretty much all you can do is wait.
Plouffe [campaign manager David Plouffe] and Axe were driven crazy by the helplessness, passing hours on their BlackBerrys scrounging for field reports, rumors, bad weather – anything that might be taken as a data point. I took the opposite tack, giving myself over to uncertainty as one might lie back and float over a wave. I did start the morning by calling into a round of drive-time radio shows, mostly at Black stations, reminding people to get out and vote. Around 7.30, Michelle and I cast our votes at the Beulah Shoesmith elementary school, a few blocks from our home in Hyde Park, bringing Malia and Sasha with us and sending them on to school after that.
On vacation, playing basketball with White House staffers, August 2009. Photograph: Pete Souza/The White House
I then made a quick trip to Indianapolis to visit a field office and shake hands with voters. Later, I played basketball (a superstition Reggie [personal aide Reggie Love] and I had developed after we played the morning of the Iowa caucus but failed to play the day of the New Hampshire primary) with Michelle’s brother Craig, some old buddies and a handful of my friends’ sons who were fast and strong enough to keep us all working hard. It was a competitive game, filled with the usual good-natured trash talk, although I noticed an absence of hard fouls. This was per Craig’s orders, I learned later, since he knew his sister would hold him accountable if I came home with a black eye.
Gibbs, meanwhile, was tracking news from the battleground states, reporting that turnout appeared to be shattering records across the country, creating problems in some polling places as voters waited four or five hours to cast their ballots. Broadcasts from the scenes, Gibbs said, showed people more jubilant than frustrated, with seniors in lawn chairs and volunteers passing out refreshments as if they were all at a neighborhood block party.
I spent the rest of the afternoon at home, puttering around uselessly while Michelle and the girls got their hair done. Alone in my study, I made a point of editing the drafts of both my victory and concession speeches. Around 8pm, Axe called to say that the networks had called Pennsylvania in our favor, and Marvin [trip director Marvin Nicholson] said we should start heading to the downtown hotel where we’d be watching the returns before moving over to the public gathering at Grant Park.
Campaigning for the US Senate in 2004, watched by daughter Malia. Photograph: David Katz © 2020
Outside the front gate of our house, the number of Secret Service agents and vehicles seemed to have doubled over the past few hours. The head of my detail, Jeff Gilbert, shook my hand and pulled me into a brief embrace. It was unseasonably warm for Chicago at that time of year, almost in the mid-60s, and as we drove down Lake Shore Drive, Michelle and I were quiet, staring out the window at Lake Michigan, listening to the girls horsing around in the back seat. Suddenly Malia turned to me and asked, “Daddy, did you win?”
“I think so, sweetie.”
“And we’re supposed to be going to the big party to celebrate?”
“That’s right. Why do you ask?”
“Well, it doesn’t seem like that many people might be coming to the party, ’cause there are no cars on the road.”
I laughed, realizing my daughter was right; save for our motorcade, the six lanes in both directions were completely empty.
Security had changed at the hotel as well, with armed Swat teams deployed in the stairwells. Our family and closest friends were already in the suite, everyone smiling, kids racing around the room, and yet the atmosphere was still strangely muted, as if the reality of what was about to happen hadn’t yet settled in their minds. My mother-in-law, in particular, made no pretense of being relaxed; through the din, I noticed her sitting on the couch, her eyes fixed on the television, her expression one of disbelief. I tried to imagine what she must be thinking, having grown up just a few miles away during a time when there were still many Chicago neighborhoods that Blacks could not even safely enter; a time when office work was out of reach for most Blacks, and her father, unable to get a union card from white-controlled trade unions, had been forced to make do as an itinerant tradesman; a time when the thought of a Black US president would have seemed as far-fetched as a pig taking flight.
With his mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, on election night. Photograph: David Katz © 2020
I took a seat next to her on the couch. “You OK?” I asked.
Marian shrugged and kept staring at the television. She said, “This is kind of too much.”
“I know.” I took her hand and squeezed it, the two of us sitting in companionable silence for a few minutes. Then suddenly a shot of my face flashed up on the TV screen and ABC News announced that I would be the 44th president of the United States.
Barack Obama reads an excerpt from his memoir Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen $https://audio.guim.co.uk/2020/11/20-48048-Chapter9Clip2.wav 00:00:00 00:01:29
The room erupted. Shouts could be heard up and down the hall. Michelle and I kissed, and she pulled back gently to give me the once-over as she laughed and shook her head. Reggie and Marvin rushed in to give everyone big bear hugs. Soon Plouffe, Axe and Gibbs walked in, and I indulged them for several minutes as they rattled off state-by-state results before telling them what I knew to be true – that as much as anything I’d done, it was their skill, hard work, insight, tenacity, loyalty and heart, along with the commitment of the entire team, that had made this moment possible.
The rest of the night is mostly a blur to me now. I remember John McCain’s phone call, which was as gracious as his concession speech. He emphasized how proud America should be of the history that had been made and pledged to help me succeed. There were congratulatory calls from President Bush and several foreign leaders, and a conversation with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, both of whose caucuses had had very good nights. I remember meeting Joe Biden’s 91-year-old mother, who took pleasure in telling me how she’d scolded Joe for even considering not being on the ticket.
More than 200,000 people had gathered in Grant Park that night, the stage facing Chicago’s glittering skyline. I can see in my mind even now some of the faces looking up as I walked onstage, men and women and children of every race, some wealthy, some poor, some famous and some not, some smiling ecstatically, others openly weeping. I’ve reread lines from my speech that night and heard accounts from staff and friends of what it felt like to be there.
A crowd at the Lincoln Memorial – Obama’s favourite image of the night. Photograph: Matt Mendelsohn
But I worry that my memories of that night, like so much else that’s happened these past 12 years, are shaded by the images that I’ve seen, the footage of our family walking across the stage, the photographs of the crowds and lights and magnificent backdrops. As beautiful as they are, they don’t always match the lived experience. In fact, my favorite photograph from that night isn’t of Grant Park at all. Rather it’s one I received many years later as a gift, a photograph of the Lincoln Memorial, taken as I was giving my speech in Chicago. It shows a small gathering of people on the stairs, their faces obscured by the darkness, and behind them the giant figure shining brightly, his marble face craggy, his eyes slightly downcast. They’re listening to the radio, I am told, quietly contemplating who we are as a people – and the arc of this thing we call democracy.


theguardian--2020-11-21--Barack Obama reads an excerpt from his memoir – audio

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The former US president recalls the excitement of the 2008 night he was elected, in a passage from A Promised Land
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theguardian--2020-11-21--Barack Obama: ‘Donald Trump and I tell very different stories about America’

If you ’ re a former US president , there ’ s one guaranteed way to be remembered fondly – make sure you ’ re followed by a truly awful successor .
It certainly worked for Barack Obama : you only had to mention his name these last four years to send millions of Americans ( and others ) into a reverie of nostalgic longing .
The gulf in calibre between Donald Trump and his predecessor was so wide that each day Trump sat in the Oval Office , Obama ’ s reputation shone a little brighter .
Not that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump took office , Obama left the White House with unusually high approval ratings : 59 % of Americans thought well of him , according to Gallup – and that figure has held ever since .
Outside the US , Obama recently displaced Bill Gates as the world ’ s most admired man , according to YouGov , which is handy as Obama is married to the world ’ s most admired woman .
If you had to construct the unTrump , Barack Obama is what you ’ d come up with : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the point of self-doubt ; a faithful husband and conspicuously devoted father .
He was a chief executive whose team was so functional that , over the course of eight years , there was scarcely a leak ; not a single person was forced to resign in disgrace , let alone face legal proceedings .
The closest the Obama White House got to scandal was when he wore a pale “ tan ” suit in 2014 , a look some considered unpresidential .
Not for nothing did they call him “ no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to criticise in his record , whether it be a covert drone war that saw 10 times the number of strikes as were authorised under George W Bush , resulting in the loss of as many as 800 civilian lives in Pakistan , Somalia and Yemen – or a failure to enforce his supposed “ red line ” on the use of chemical weapons in Syria , a failure that Bashar al-Assad seemed to read as a licence to keep killing his own people .
You can criticise Obama for failing to do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so that people who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 voted for Trump in 2016 .
Still , and even taking all that into account , from the vantage point of 2020 the Obama presidency looks like a calm , flat sea before the roiling tempest of Trump .
The outgoing president features only a little in Obama ’ s 751-page memoir , A Promised Land , which covers the period from the author ’ s entry into politics – winning a seat in the state senate of Illinois in 1995 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ensured his re-election : the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 .
A second volume will address the rest .
The book is written in the same voice that made Dreams From My Father a bestseller , letting the reader in on the author ’ s inner monologue – as Obama observes his own life as it plays out , questioning his motivations , noticing his hypocrisies .
Trump ’ s cameo role is that of villain , the lead proponent of “ birtherism ” , spreading the racist smear that Obama @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ a conspiracy theory he almost certainly knew to be false , ” Obama writes .
Trump also makes an appearance as the butt of Obama ’ s jokes on the fateful night in 2011 when , delivering the traditional comic turn at the White House Correspondents ’ Dinner , the president mocked Trump as a man whose idea of an important decision was choosing between the boys ’ and girls ’ teams on Celebrity Apprentice .
Was it that humiliation that stung Trump into seeking the presidency , just to get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ election gone the other way , the publication of Obama ’ s book would have been tinged with melancholy , even futility .
He would have been celebrating a legacy that was halfway to being dismantled .
For if the Trump presidency had a defining theme , it was its obsessive desire to destroy the record of Barack Obama .
Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords and Iran nuclear deal , both brokered by Obama ; he itched to destroy the Obamacare reforms to health provision .
Doubtless , he will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of erasure done in his remaining weeks in office , between now and January 20 .
But armed with a second term , Trump would have had four years to finish the job .
Now Joe Biden will undo that undoing .
He ’ s promised to reverse some of Trump ’ s reverses the day he takes office : rejoining the Paris accords and the World Health Organization , for example .
Biden-Harris may not amount to a third term of Obama-Biden , but it will ensure the first two are not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there was to be no face-to-face interview with the Guardian , not even by Zoom .
Instead , as befits a writer – especially one who likes to keep control – the former president opted for an exchange on the page : written questions , written answers .
Of course there are a thousand things anyone would want to ask him .
Is the book called A Promised Land because he feels he never quite got there ?
Did he waste the power he had when he had it , by trying to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ interest in meeting him halfway – but instead wanted to hobble him from the start ?
Did he let the bankers culpable for the crash of 2008 off too lightly ?
Obama chose which questions to answer , opting perhaps for those designed not to catch him out but to encourage him to open up .
That would fit : if Trump relishes the combative shoutiness of Twitter , Obama has always been a bit more Instagram – curated and personable .
The 44th US president doesn ’ t much like talking about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all the same , between the lines .
Obama suggests that he and Trump were telling duelling stories about America .
Now , at the very moment Trump ’ s story has been rejected and cut short , Obama has a new chance to tell his .
From fake news to the climate crisis : the view from the Oval Office Are you a writer who became a politician , rather than a politician who ’ s done some writing ?
Great question .
Because the truth is , in a lot of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the job of a politician overlap .
Both are trying to tell a story that connects with folks .
I mean , Donald Trump and I ran on very different stories about what America is all about , but you can ’ t say either of us didn ’ t tell a story .
As a writer , you are also better able to avoid some of the pitfalls that politicians encounter .
For example , there ’ s a temptation , in politics , to talk about voters in broad categories @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democrats and Republicans , hockey moms and soccer moms .
Those categories can give us some understanding of people ’ s lives , but they don ’ t show us what ’ s happening inside – their complexities and contradictions .
When you ’ re a writer , your job is all about figuring out how to show your readers that interior life .
I think that ’ s a perspective we could use more of in our politics .
You write that for your aides , David Plouffe , David Axelrod and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for racial progress was simple – we needed to win ” in 2008 .
Given all that we saw this summer , were they – were we – naive in thinking that the act of electing the first Black president might ease America ’ s racial pain ?
Obviously , we have a long way to go on race in this country .
You won ’ t find a quote from me , or my aides , saying that my election would somehow usher in a post-racial society .
But I also don @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that there is a generation of kids out there who would turn on the TV and see a president who looked like them – with a cabinet and a staff by his side that reflected the fuller palette of our country ’ s diversity .
And , by the way , that didn ’ t just have an impact on African American kids .
It had an impact on white kids , too , who will enter the world knowing it ’ s not unusual for a person of color to be in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ feel old to say , but the reality is that those kids – kids from every background who grew up when I was president – have already done so much to move our country forward .
They ’ re the ones who took to the streets this summer to lead the fight for racial justice .
And now , our roles are reversed : they ’ re the ones on my television set , inspiring me .
In the book , you describe repeatedly being on the end of campaigns of deliberate disinformation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ healthcare plan .
Now that conspiracy theories have become mainstream , how vulnerable is truth , and what can it do to fight back ?
Well , the truth is the truth .
Some people just think it ’ s in their interest to lie about it .
Sometimes it works , especially on social media where you ’ ll trust something you hear from a friend or an uncle or an outlet that tells you what you want to hear , but you ’ ll shut out a fact-checker from a publication @ @ @ @ @ @ @ against you .
The term “ information bubbles ” sometimes belies the danger : without a baseline of broadly shared facts , democracy is going to be in constant crisis .
There ’ s no one solution here .
It ’ s a complicated knot that ’ s going to take a while to get untangled .
These conspiracy theories can take on a life of their own online , and platforms haven ’ t quite figured out how to grapple with them .
They ’ re always playing catch-up – trying to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s out in the ether .
And when people and media companies who should know better don ’ t disavow or distance themselves from these obvious conspiracy theories , folks don ’ t know what to think .
So all of us have a role to play in bringing us back toward a common set of facts – elected leaders , tech companies , the media , our education system and all of us as citizens .
You played golf as well as some basketball with your aides – but were there times @ @ @ @ @ @ @ How do you recharge ?
Golf was a big help .
The truth is , when you ’ re president , it ’ s one of the only ways you can consistently get fresh air .
I also made sure to recharge every evening at 6.30pm when I would have dinner with Michelle , Sasha and Malia .
We ’ d eat some good meals and catch up on our days .
That was one of the best parts of living above the store , as I liked to call it .
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ every night , even if that meant that I needed to go back to work after dinner .
The reality is , for better or worse , I ’ m a pretty steady guy .
And over the course of my time in politics , whether I was dealing with losing New Hampshire during the primary or the bottom was falling out of the economy , I found that I was often my most level-headed when things were going to hell .
You close your book with a meditation on a question that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the operation to catch Osama bin Laden : was it only possible to muster that “ unity of effort ” when the goal involved killing a terrorist ?
You go on to say that there has not been a similar focus on the climate crisis .
You made a breakthrough in Paris – but in terms of the climate , what didn ’ t you achieve and why ?
Is it the case that even someone in the most powerful job in the world can only do so much ?
You know , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I wasn ’ t just lamenting politics as it is .
I was imagining politics as it could be .
What would happen , I wondered , if we could rally that kind of energy and unity to educate our children or eliminate homelessness ?
What might the country feel like if we could stir enough passion to eliminate greenhouse gases or reduce poverty ?
I joke in the book that my staff would have laughed at this idea for being too utopian – and look , I recognize it ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ today .
But the reality is , an issue like climate change isn ’ t going to be solved by only one party – or even by only one country .
That ’ s one of the lessons you learn as president , over and over again : you learn what you can ’ t do on your own .
Whether you ’ re trying to make a difference domestically or internationally , you need to build coalitions , invest in relationships , find ways to work together .
That ’ s how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before it became a pandemic like we ’ re seeing now .
And it ’ s why Paris was such a big deal .
With that agreement , pretty much the entire world recognized climate change as a problem and committed to being a part of the solution .
And that ’ s why I am so heartened Joe Biden will be rejoining the agreement as president .
Now , do I think rejoining Paris is all we need to do to combat climate change ?
Of course not .
We need to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clean transportation and resilient agriculture .
We need to ramp up research and development into new technologies that will create jobs and reduce our dependence on carbon .
I can go on and on .
But at the end of the day , this challenge will only be solved when leaders from across oceans and the political spectrum step up to the plate .

If you’re a former US president, there’s one guaranteed way to be remembered fondly – make sure you’re followed by a truly awful successor. It certainly worked for Barack Obama: you only had to mention his name these last four years to send millions of Americans (and others) into a reverie of nostalgic longing. The gulf in calibre between Donald Trump and his predecessor was so wide that each day Trump sat in the Oval Office, Obama’s reputation shone a little brighter.
Not that he needed the comparison. Even before Trump took office, Obama left the White House with unusually high approval ratings: 59% of Americans thought well of him, according to Gallup – and that figure has held ever since. Outside the US, Obama recently displaced Bill Gates as the world’s most admired man, according to YouGov, which is handy as Obama is married to the world’s most admired woman.
If you had to construct the unTrump, Barack Obama is what you’d come up with: cerebral and well-read; deliberative; self-critical to the point of self-doubt; a faithful husband and conspicuously devoted father. He was a chief executive whose team was so functional that, over the course of eight years, there was scarcely a leak; not a single person was forced to resign in disgrace, let alone face legal proceedings. The closest the Obama White House got to scandal was when he wore a pale “tan” suit in 2014, a look some considered unpresidential. Not for nothing did they call him “no drama Obama”.
If you had to construct the unTrump, Obama is what you’d come up with: cerebral, well-read and self-critical
There is much to criticise in his record, whether it be a covert drone war that saw 10 times the number of strikes as were authorised under George W Bush, resulting in the loss of as many as 800 civilian lives in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen – or a failure to enforce his supposed “red line” on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, a failure that Bashar al-Assad seemed to read as a licence to keep killing his own people. You can criticise Obama for failing to do enough for small-town and postindustrial America, so that people who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 voted for Trump in 2016. Still, and even taking all that into account, from the vantage point of 2020 the Obama presidency looks like a calm, flat sea before the roiling tempest of Trump.
The outgoing president features only a little in Obama’s 751-page memoir, A Promised Land, which covers the period from the author’s entry into politics – winning a seat in the state senate of Illinois in 1995 – until the moment that may have ensured his re-election: the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. A second volume will address the rest. The book is written in the same voice that made Dreams From My Father a bestseller, letting the reader in on the author’s inner monologue – as Obama observes his own life as it plays out, questioning his motivations, noticing his hypocrisies.
Trump’s cameo role is that of villain, the lead proponent of “birtherism”, spreading the racist smear that Obama was not really born in the US, “a conspiracy theory he almost certainly knew to be false,” Obama writes. Trump also makes an appearance as the butt of Obama’s jokes on the fateful night in 2011 when, delivering the traditional comic turn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the president mocked Trump as a man whose idea of an important decision was choosing between the boys’ and girls’ teams on Celebrity Apprentice. Was it that humiliation that stung Trump into seeking the presidency, just to get even?
Barack and Michelle Obama have breakfast with Joe and Jill Biden, on their second day of campaigning together, in Ohio, August 2008. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Had this month’s election gone the other way, the publication of Obama’s book would have been tinged with melancholy, even futility. He would have been celebrating a legacy that was halfway to being dismantled. For if the Trump presidency had a defining theme, it was its obsessive desire to destroy the record of Barack Obama. Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords and Iran nuclear deal, both brokered by Obama; he itched to destroy the Obamacare reforms to health provision. Doubtless, he will try to get more of that work of erasure done in his remaining weeks in office, between now and January 20. But armed with a second term, Trump would have had four years to finish the job.
Now Joe Biden will undo that undoing. He’s promised to reverse some of Trump’s reverses the day he takes office: rejoining the Paris accords and the World Health Organization, for example. Biden-Harris may not amount to a third term of Obama-Biden, but it will ensure the first two are not erased.
Barack Obama reads an excerpt from his memoir Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen $https://audio.guim.co.uk/2020/11/20-48048-Chapter9Clip2.wav 00:00:00 00:01:29
Thanks to the pandemic, there was to be no face-to-face interview with the Guardian, not even by Zoom. Instead, as befits a writer – especially one who likes to keep control – the former president opted for an exchange on the page: written questions, written answers. Of course there are a thousand things anyone would want to ask him. Is the book called A Promised Land because he feels he never quite got there? Did he waste the power he had when he had it, by trying to compromise with Republicans who never had any interest in meeting him halfway – but instead wanted to hobble him from the start? Did he let the bankers culpable for the crash of 2008 off too lightly?
Obama chose which questions to answer, opting perhaps for those designed not to catch him out but to encourage him to open up. That would fit: if Trump relishes the combative shoutiness of Twitter, Obama has always been a bit more Instagram – curated and personable. The 44th US president doesn’t much like talking about the 45th, but Trump is present all the same, between the lines. Obama suggests that he and Trump were telling duelling stories about America. Now, at the very moment Trump’s story has been rejected and cut short, Obama has a new chance to tell his.
At Trump’s inauguration, January 2017. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/Pool/Getty Images
From fake news to the climate crisis: the view from the Oval Office
Are you a writer who became a politician, rather than a politician who’s done some writing?
Great question. Because the truth is, in a lot of ways, the job of a writer and the job of a politician overlap. Both are trying to tell a story that connects with folks. I mean, Donald Trump and I ran on very different stories about what America is all about, but you can’t say either of us didn’t tell a story.
As a writer, you are also better able to avoid some of the pitfalls that politicians encounter. For example, there’s a temptation, in politics, to talk about voters in broad categories: white voters and Black voters, Democrats and Republicans, hockey moms and soccer moms. Those categories can give us some understanding of people’s lives, but they don’t show us what’s happening inside – their complexities and contradictions. When you’re a writer, your job is all about figuring out how to show your readers that interior life. I think that’s a perspective we could use more of in our politics.
You write that for your aides, David Plouffe, David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, “the immediate formula for racial progress was simple – we needed to win” in 2008. Given all that we saw this summer, were they – were we – naive in thinking that the act of electing the first Black president might ease America’s racial pain?
Obviously, we have a long way to go on race in this country. You won’t find a quote from me, or my aides, saying that my election would somehow usher in a post-racial society. But I also don’t want to undersell the fact that there is a generation of kids out there who would turn on the TV and see a president who looked like them – with a cabinet and a staff by his side that reflected the fuller palette of our country’s diversity. And, by the way, that didn’t just have an impact on African American kids. It had an impact on white kids, too, who will enter the world knowing it’s not unusual for a person of color to be in a leadership position.
This makes me feel old to say, but the reality is that those kids – kids from every background who grew up when I was president – have already done so much to move our country forward. They’re the ones who took to the streets this summer to lead the fight for racial justice. And now, our roles are reversed: they’re the ones on my television set, inspiring me.
A protest in June over the killing of George Floyd. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
In the book, you describe repeatedly being on the end of campaigns of deliberate disinformation – whether about your birth certificate or healthcare plan. Now that conspiracy theories have become mainstream, how vulnerable is truth, and what can it do to fight back?
Well, the truth is the truth. Some people just think it’s in their interest to lie about it. Sometimes it works, especially on social media where you’ll trust something you hear from a friend or an uncle or an outlet that tells you what you want to hear, but you’ll shut out a fact-checker from a publication you’ve been told is slanted against you. The term “information bubbles” sometimes belies the danger: without a baseline of broadly shared facts, democracy is going to be in constant crisis.
‘As a president, you learn what you can’t do on your own.’ Photograph: Pari Dukovic
There’s no one solution here. It’s a complicated knot that’s going to take a while to get untangled. These conspiracy theories can take on a life of their own online, and platforms haven’t quite figured out how to grapple with them. They’re always playing catch-up – trying to stamp out the lie after it’s out in the ether. And when people and media companies who should know better don’t disavow or distance themselves from these obvious conspiracy theories, folks don’t know what to think. So all of us have a role to play in bringing us back toward a common set of facts – elected leaders, tech companies, the media, our education system and all of us as citizens.
You played golf as well as some basketball with your aides – but were there times when even you could not unwind? How do you recharge?
Golf was a big help. The truth is, when you’re president, it’s one of the only ways you can consistently get fresh air.
I also made sure to recharge every evening at 6.30pm when I would have dinner with Michelle, Sasha and Malia. We’d eat some good meals and catch up on our days. That was one of the best parts of living above the store, as I liked to call it. I could spend quality time with my family every night, even if that meant that I needed to go back to work after dinner.
The reality is, for better or worse, I’m a pretty steady guy. And over the course of my time in politics, whether I was dealing with losing New Hampshire during the primary or the bottom was falling out of the economy, I found that I was often my most level-headed when things were going to hell.
Playing golf in Hawaii, December 2014. Photograph: Gary Cameron/Reuters
You close your book with a meditation on a question that nagged at you after the success of the operation to catch Osama bin Laden: was it only possible to muster that “unity of effort” when the goal involved killing a terrorist? You go on to say that there has not been a similar focus on the climate crisis. You made a breakthrough in Paris – but in terms of the climate, what didn’t you achieve and why? Is it the case that even someone in the most powerful job in the world can only do so much?
You know, when I was writing that passage, I wasn’t just lamenting politics as it is. I was imagining politics as it could be. What would happen, I wondered, if we could rally that kind of energy and unity to educate our children or eliminate homelessness? What might the country feel like if we could stir enough passion to eliminate greenhouse gases or reduce poverty?
I joke in the book that my staff would have laughed at this idea for being too utopian – and look, I recognize it’s a far cry from the politics we have today. But the reality is, an issue like climate change isn’t going to be solved by only one party – or even by only one country.
That’s one of the lessons you learn as president, over and over again: you learn what you can’t do on your own. Whether you’re trying to make a difference domestically or internationally, you need to build coalitions, invest in relationships, find ways to work together. That’s how we rallied the world to confront Ebola before it became a pandemic like we’re seeing now.
And it’s why Paris was such a big deal. With that agreement, pretty much the entire world recognized climate change as a problem and committed to being a part of the solution. And that’s why I am so heartened Joe Biden will be rejoining the agreement as president.
Now, do I think rejoining Paris is all we need to do to combat climate change? Of course not. We need to make massive investments in clean energy, clean transportation and resilient agriculture. We need to ramp up research and development into new technologies that will create jobs and reduce our dependence on carbon. I can go on and on. But at the end of the day, this challenge will only be solved when leaders from across oceans and the political spectrum step up to the plate.