As President Barack Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, made his way across a hotel ballroom on the night of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2011, he happened to overhear Donald J. Trump boasting to other guests. “I know it’s crazy,” Mr. Trump was saying, “but I’m in front of the polls.”
“I kind of chuckled at it and went to my seat,” Mr. Axelrod recalled. “I don’t think any of us really anticipated that Donald Trump would be a serious candidate for president, much less president.” It was later that same evening that Mr. Obama would mock Mr. Trump from the stage, ridiculing the reality television star in a moment that would go viral.
In fact, Mr. Obama and his team never saw Mr. Trump coming, as a new set of oral history interviews released on Tuesday makes abundantly clear. He was, to them, a “con man,” a “clown,” a “laughingstock.” He was a thorn in the side with his birther lies and demagogic bloviating. But as it turned out, Mr. Obama and his advisers, like many others, missed the shifting mood of the country that would ultimately upend Mr. Axelrod’s assumptions.
The oral history, compiled by Incite Institute, a social science research center at Columbia University, represents the most extensive set of interviews made public to date from the Obama presidency. The institute, in cooperation with the Obama Foundation, conducted more than 450 interviews totaling more than 1,100 hours of audio and video with cabinet secretaries, White House aides, family members, opposition leaders and outside figures affected by administration policies.
Two limited tranches of the oral history interviews were released previously, but the institute posted the full set online on Tuesday morning for the perusal of historians, researchers and the merely curious. The interviews do not include Mr. Obama himself or his wife, Michelle Obama, or vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., but do include major figures like Hillary Clinton, John F. Kerry, Robert M. Gates, Paul D. Ryan, Oprah Winfrey and even the former president’s mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, who died in 2024.
The interviews tell the back story of a presidency that pulled the country out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, passed landmark legislation on health care, gay rights and financial regulation, brought home most troops from Iraq and hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden. They also explore the failure to stop the Russian annexation of Crimea, the slaughter in Syria, the collapse of Libya and the rise of the Islamic State.
But nine years after he left office with high approval ratings and one year into Mr. Trump’s second term, what remains striking is how inconceivable it seemed to Mr. Obama and his team that populist disenchantment with the establishment, globalization and demographic changes would elevate a figure they scorned. It was a question that hovered over the interviews as they struggled for answers.
“The outcome of the election was a direct rebuke of everything that we had been trying to do for the last 10 years,” reflected Josh Earnest, who was Mr. Obama’s last White House press secretary.
“Trump’s candidacy,” he added, “the essence of his being and everything that he stood for and everything about the way that he carried himself and everything that he championed and his rhetoric, his campaign tactics — all were anathema to everything that the Obama campaign and the Obama era, the Obama administration, had been about.”
Mr. Axelrod recounted that the first time he ever spoke with Mr. Trump was in 2010 during the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Mr. Trump reached out through Mika Brzezinski, one of the hosts of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, to offer his services to plug the leak. Mr. Axelrod thought it was preposterous and politely declined.
But when the spill was finally halted, Mr. Trump had another idea for Mr. Axelrod. “I build ballrooms, I build the greatest — you can ask anybody, my ballrooms are the greatest ballrooms,” Mr. Trump told him by phone, as Mr. Axelrod recalled. “You have these state dinners, and you have them in these shitty little tents out in the backyard. Let me build a modular ballroom that you can assemble when you have state dinners so it’ll look good.”
Mr. Axelrod thought that would be a bad signal in the midst of “this monstrous recession” and brushed him off. “I said: ‘Well, that’s really nice of you. I’m going to pass this on to the social secretary and I’ll have her call you,’” Mr. Axelrod recalled. “I did. She didn’t.” Nearly a decade later, Mr. Trump is now finally building his ballroom.
The decision to roast Mr. Trump at the 2011 correspondents’ dinner stemmed from aggravation over the continuing lies about Mr. Obama’s birthplace. “I thought what he was doing was racist,” recalled Jon Favreau, the speechwriter who helped draft the remarks. “I thought and still do think that he is a ridiculous human being who deserves to be ridiculed at every possible chance.”
Mr. Favreau and his colleagues came up with lines making fun of Mr. Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” television show. “We gave it to Obama and he loved it,” Mr. Favreau said. “He was so excited to do it.” Did Mr. Favreau think at the time that Mr. Trump might be a formidable presidential candidate? “Not even a brief moment did I ever think that.”
After the dinner, Mr. Favreau said Mr. Trump approached Seth Meyers, the late-night comic who performed that night and also made fun of Mr. Trump. “He told Seth: ‘That was very unfair what you did. It was very unfair.’” At the after-party, Mr. Favreau said, he and Mr. Meyers laughed at Mr. Trump. “We were like, ‘Wow, we really got him.’”
There are those who speculate that Mr. Trump’s red-faced fury that evening may have played a part in motivating him to run for president. He kicked off his campaign four years later, in June 2015. “Nobody took it seriously at the time,” said Cody Keenan, another speechwriter for Mr. Obama.
Indeed, after Mr. Trump proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, Mr. Earnest dismissed the Republican candidate from the White House lectern. “I talked about Donald Trump and his ideas being relegated to the dustbin of history,” Mr. Earnest recalled. “I think I was kind of wrong about that unfortunately.”
Mr. Trump surged to the Republican nomination despite the Obama team’s expectations, but even then they assumed he could not beat Mrs. Clinton in the general election. Mr. Obama wanted to give a speech at the Democratic National Convention pushing back against the forces that Mr. Trump represented.
“At the time, I don’t think anybody thought Donald Trump was going to win,” Mr. Keenan said. “So it wasn’t aimed at him, and that’s because his party is the party that made it happen. None of this began with Donald Trump. These were trends that have been happening for a long time, stoking fear of the others, stoking misinformation, kind of this phony populism that turned people against each other.”
While more voters cast ballots for Mrs. Clinton, making her the popular-vote winner, the Electoral College lined up for Mr. Trump, making him the president-elect. The White House was a dark place in the days that followed.
“There’s a pall over everything because you have no idea what the Trump stuff is going to be, and everything feels at risk,” said Denis McDonough, the last White House chief of staff for Mr. Obama. “I feel like we accomplished what we set to accomplish. Except Trump won.”
The day after the election, Mr. Obama called distraught aides to the Oval Office to comfort them. “History doesn’t move in a straight line,” he told them and encouraged them to be proud of what they had accomplished.
“What struck me in those days after Trump won was even in the midst of that how steady he was,” Mr. Favreau said. “I expected to find him depressed, alarmed, panicked. None of that.”
But there were some moments when the normally stoic Mr. Obama revealed his own emotions. “He came to speak to the senior staff,” recalled Christy Goldfuss, the managing director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “He got up to give a speech and he started crying and he thanked everybody and he thanks all of us for believing in him.”
He was not the only one with moist eyes. Jen Psaki, who was Mr. Obama’s communications director, recalled that even figures like Jacob J. Lew, the Treasury secretary, and Susan Rice, the national security adviser, “all these people who are so tough and smart and complete badasses,” were “tearing up” at points.
In those moments, and plenty since, it was hard for Mr. Obama’s team not to wonder what it all meant. “It’s like, was that a success?” Ms. Psaki reflected. “I don’t know, but it is a piece of history, which is important.”
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.
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