Zeihan: Barack Obama's leadership style turned voters towards Trump

When Barack Obama delivered his acceptance speech in Chicago in 2008, he declared, “a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.” But was Obama a great leader? According to a Pew Research study, public trust in government hit an all-time low of 17% during Obama’s presidency. In 2014, U.S. News’ Mortimer Zuckerman said that Obama “endures, rather than enjoys, the small talk and the backslapping of retail politics” and that his reputation for aloofness and arrogance may make him partly responsible for the “cruel slide from hope and change to partisan gridlock.” Straight Arrow News contributor Peter Zeihan agrees, arguing that it was Obama’s disconnected, laissez-faire leadership style that led many disenfranchised voters to turn towards his successor, Donald Trump.

Excerpted from Peter’s Nov. 1 “Zeihan on Geopolitics” newsletter:

Many people are surprised when I say that Barack Obama was the second-smartest American president of recent history, after Bill Clinton. I should also say that in no way does that serve as an endorsement or that I think either was necessarily successful. President Obama, in particular, seemed not only ill-suited to, but ultimately disinterested in, engaging with the management of the massive, sprawling bureaucracy that is the U.S. Federal Government.

Some presidents relish the cooperation, or combativeness, of engaging with the legislative branch. Barack Obama? Not so much. Was he engaged with his cabinet, suggesting policy and working to overhaul the federal bureaucracy? No. What about rebuilding his party? Famously not. Was he interested in managing the post-Bush, post-Iraq global order? Absolutely not. After four terms of presidents, presidents who were charismatic and personable leaders, the Obama presidency presented a very “the man in the ivory tower” vibe – one that I’d argue laid the groundwork for Donald Trump’s runaway popularity with so much of the American electorate.

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.