Partisanship and slowness in Washington will largely block President-elect Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the Obama administration’s main programs and regulations, President Obama claims.
“The federal government is an aircraft carrier, it’s not a speedboat,” says Obama. “Maybe 15 percent of that gets rolled back, 20 percent, but there’s still a lot of stuff that sticks.”
Obama’s comments to the New Yorker fly in the face of evidence from Trump Tower and House and Senate GOP leadership offices that much of his agenda, starting with Obamacare and immigration, face revisions or outright rejection.
In the interview, Obama says that there is a possibility that Trump succeeds in eliminating much of his agenda, but he sounds confident it won’t happen.
From the interview with David Remnick:
Throughout the campaign, he had told his audiences that if Trump—”uniquely unqualified” and “temperamentally unfit” to be Commander-in-Chief—were to win, eight years of accomplishment would go out the window. I asked him if he still believed that.
“Now that the election is over, no, I don’t believe it,” he said with a sharp, dark laugh. “Not because I was over-hyping it. I think that the possibility of everything being out the window exists. But, as a practical matter, what I’ve been saying to people, including my own staff, is that the federal government is an aircraft carrier, it’s not a speedboat. And, if you need any evidence of that, think about how hard we worked over the last eight years with a very clear progressive agenda, with a majority in the House and in the Senate, and we accomplished as much domestically as any President since Lyndon Johnson in those first two years. But it was really hard.” Obama said that he had accomplished “seventy or seventy-five per cent” of what he set out to do, and “maybe fifteen per cent of that gets rolled back, twenty per cent, but there’s still a lot of stuff that sticks.”
He went on, “Obviously, the Affordable Care Act, I think, is most vulnerable, because that has been a unifying bogeyman for Republicans over the course of the last six years. In the minds of a lot of the Republican base, it is an example of a big government program designed to take something from them and give it to someone else who is unworthy.” But he said that, while the Republicans would have to make some attempt to deliver on that, they had to proceed with care, because the program’s twenty-odd million beneficiaries included many Trump voters, “even if they don’t make the connection.”
If the Republicans “tinker and modify but still maintain a commitment to provide health insurance for the people who received it,” he said, “then a whole bunch of stuff hasn’t gone out the window.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
