A week before election day, US President Barack Obama took to the airwaves and warned his listeners that were US president-elect Donald Trump to become his successor, the billionaire would spend his first couple of weeks in the Oval Office “reversing every single thing that we’ve done.”
The comment was designed to frighten Obama loyalists, particularly African-Americans, to the polls. However, now that that fear has become reality, and Trump is indeed to become the 45th president of the US, the idea that the Obama legacy is imperiled sounds all too realistic.
For a start, the signature legislative achievement of the Obama years — the Affordable Care Act — is now certain to come under attack from the incoming Trump administration.
The president-elect has made it a mantra of his 18 months on the campaign trail that on day one in the White House he would ask US Congress to repeal the legislation.
Trump has been less energetic in setting out how he would provide for the almost 13 million people who are currently in receipt of health insurance through Obamacare.
He has also promised to protect people with pre-existing medical conditions, without saying how he would pay for that.
Given the Trump campaign’s assault on the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s key piece of legislation must now be seen to be mortally threatened. So too are many of the other policy passions pursued by Obama in his second term, when he relied increasingly on his executive powers as a means of breaking the gridlock in the US Congress.
Obama’s substantial use of executive orders — reforms introduced without the seal of Congress — has been a double-edged sword for the president. It allowed him to bypass intransigent Republicans in the US House of Representatives and get things done with the stroke of a pen, or 235 strokes of a pen to be precise.
However, it left his legacy exposed to being swept aside with a similar stroke of the pen, just as soon as Trump gets his feet under the Resolute desk on his first working day, Jan. 21.
Among the many Obama reforms that could be swiftly undone are his efforts to combat climate change.
In August last year, Obama announced his “clean power” plan, which seeks to reduce emissions from power plants and switch from polluting coal energy to sustainable wind and solar. The plan is on hold in the courts, but Trump is now in a position to kill it off entirely before the judges get to release their ruling.
Similarly, the Democratic president’s attempts to introduce gun control through executive orders in the wake of a succession of devastating rampages such as that in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 are now all at the mercy of Trump, who repeatedly invoked the second amendment on the campaign trail.
On immigration, Obama’s attempts to unilaterally extend legal status to millions of young immigrants who entered the US illegally and their parents through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents programs could fall foul of Trump’s threat to overturn both initiatives.
On the world stage, Obama came to power promising in his famous “new beginning” speech in Cairo to show “mutual respect” for other people and their governments, and a renewed drive to build alliances rather than to engage in diplomacy through confrontation. He has sought to bring home the US military from wars abroad and talked about his ambition to move toward a world without nuclear weapons.
Although his actual achievements — from Afghanistan to Iraq and Syria — are patchy and a matter of ongoing fierce debate, in Trump the US would have a world leader dedicated to moving in a diametrically opposed direction. Trump has replaced Obama’s emphasis on alliances with admiration for the authoritarian rule of Russian President Vladimir Putin, threatened to stop defending NATO allies that fail to pay their way and turned the rhetoric on nuclear weapons on its head by suggesting Japan and South Korea should be allowed to become nuclear powers.
If Trump manages to act on even a small percentage of these pledges, his predecessor’s legacy could quickly appear to be in tatters.
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