Barack Obama’s leadership style turned voters towards Trump

Hey everyone, Peter Zion here, coming to you from the Smithsonian Castle in Washington DC, which I thought would be a great backdrop for the next of his leadership series on American presidents and world leaders. Topic today is Barack Obama, who in my opinion, is the third smartest president the United States has ever had after Jefferson and Clinton. 

That doesn’t mean he was successful. Barack Obama was the first leader in the post WWII era to really not come from a party. He campaigned on his personal charisma. He had never had what we would consider a grown-up job. He was the junior senator from Illinois. And aside from being a constitutional law professor, he really hadn’t had a big boy job until that point. 

And it shows in his management skills. Before becoming president. The biggest thing he’d ever done is manage his own campaign, which had a staff of like sixteen, when he was running for Senate the first time. 

In that sort of environment, when you suddenly inherit the American government apparatus with a staff of several million, he was wildly out of his depth, and more important, he wasn’t interested in the job once he got it. 

Being president means managing, and that means communicating with people. And while he was wildly intelligent, he didn’t really care to be around others. So when he absorbed his briefs, he would read them. He rarely asked questions, he might submit questions to an agency for a written brief, but he really didn’t interact with the people who put it together. So he built up his raw intelligence and his understanding of a situation in a way almost unparalleled in American history. But then nothing ever came of it. 

For eight years, the United States effectively didn’t have a foreign policy, because he didn’t want to speak with foreign leaders. He didn’t want to speak with his congressional allies. He didn’t want to speak with other people in the Democratic Party. He didn’t want to speak with his own cabinet. And so for eight years, we had one law that was basically passed in his tenure. That’s Obamacare. And it wasn’t even written by the White House. Congress put that together. 

The disconnect between Obama and the government is directly responsible for the disenchantment that a lot of Americans feel with government in general, and that led directly to the rise of the next guy. 

So if you’re looking for someone to blame for the rise of Donald Trump, you don’t have to look any further than Barack Obama. Because that disconnect is ultimately what broke trust in government – the fact that we didn’t engage for eight years. And so of course now, we have to turn to the guy who came in next.