What Obama Talks About When He Talks About Trump
How do you say you’re against everything—or even just most of what—Donald Trump stands for and not get sucked in to a constant nyah-nyah race to the bottom of being just anti-Trump? People across politics have been trying to figure that out, looking for how to resist a president chipping away at America’s core without having their words reduced to a zinger tweet or monster-truck-rally headline.
This is an issue for the Democrats gearing up to run for president who insist that their campaign can’t be about just Trump, and for the few Republican critics left in Washington who want to have a debate outside of a Twitter feed.
But no one’s grappling with it quite like Barack Obama.
Obama wants to talk about what wasn’t political or personal before Trump made everything political and personal, but every time he does, it feeds into their dynamic—in part because Trump and his supporters and the media want the mud fight, and in part because
