Former President Barack Obama (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
A conservative columnist who spent eight years criticizing former President Barack Obama says he’d take the nation’s first Black president back in a second after less than two years under the horrid leadership of President Donald Trump.
Washington Post writer Max Boot admits he was never a huge fan of Trump but penned a column the day after his stunning presidential victory encouraging optimism and arguing that a Trump presidency “might not be so awful” after all.
“The Trump we saw on the campaign trail was so erratic that it’s hard to believe he will be disciplined and prudent in office,” wrote Boot a former aide to Sens. John McCain and Mitt Romney. ” … But I’m hoping against hope that he will grow in the White House — that the office will make the man. Because if that doesn’t occur, the consequences are too ghastly to contemplate.”
He was sadly mistaken and, in a recent column for The Post, acknowledged that things were ghastly indeed.
“I would take Obama back in a nanosecond,” Boot said, adding he once thought the former POTUS was “too weak” on foreign policy issues. “His presidency appears to be a lost golden age when reason and morality reigned.”
“All his faults, real as they were, fade into insignificance compared with the crippling defects of his successor,” he continued. “And his strengths — seriousness, dignity, intellect, probity, dedication to ideals larger than self — shine all the more clearly in retrospect.”
Boot confessed he was nearly moved to tears during Obama’s speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth. He praised Obama for refraining from name- calling or constantly praising himself, which Trump regularly does during his speeches. Instead, Boot said he called the address an “eloquent defense of a liberal world order that President Trump appears bent on destroying.”
“Obama denounced the ‘politics of fear and resentment,’ the spread of ‘hatred and paranoia and propaganda and conspiracy theories,’ and ‘immigration policies based on race, or ethnicity, or religion,” he wrote. ” … The sentences were complete and sonorous — and probably written by the speaker himself. The tone was sober and high-minded, even if listeners could read between the lines a withering critique of Trump’s policies.”
Boot said he hasn’t forgotten about the Obama administration’s shortcomings but reveled in the fact that the only Obama-era scandal was over a tan-colored suit.
