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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 Tuesday morning for the perusal of historians, researchers, and the merely curious. The interviews do not include Obama or his wife, Michelle Obama, or vice president, Joe Biden, but do include major figures such as 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; rescued the auto industry; passed landmark legislation on health care, LGBTQ+ 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 group.
But nine years after he left office with high approval ratings and one year into Trump’s second term, what remains striking is how inconceivable it seemed to 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 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.”
The decision to roast Trump at the 2011 correspondents’ dinner stemmed from aggravation over the continuing lies about 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.”
Favreau and his colleagues came up with lines making fun of Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” television show. “We gave it to Obama and he loved it,” Favreau said. “He was so excited to do it.” Did Favreau think at the time that Trump might be a formidable presidential candidate? “Not even a brief moment did I ever think that.”
After the dinner, Favreau said Trump approached Seth Meyers, the late-night comic who performed that night and also made fun of Trump. “He told Seth: ‘That was very unfair what you did. It was very unfair.'” At the after-party, Favreau said, he and Meyers laughed at Trump. “We were like, ‘Wow, we really got him.'”
There are those who speculate that 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 Obama.
Indeed, after Trump proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, 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,” Earnest recalled. “I think I was kind of wrong about that unfortunately.”
Trump surged to the Republican nomination despite the Obama team’s expectations, but even then they assumed he could not beat Clinton in the general election. Obama wanted to give a speech at the Democratic National Convention pushing back against the forces that Trump represented.
“At the time, I don’t think anybody thought Donald Trump was going to win,” 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 Clinton, making her the popular-vote winner, the Electoral College lined up for Trump, making him the president-elect. The White House was a dark place in the days that followed.
