“The presidency has changed Barack Obama,” Richard Cohen informs us. “His hair has gone gray, which is to be expected, and he looks older, which is also to be expected, but his eloquence has been replaced by petulance, and he has lost the power to persuade.”

This is true, but the deeper truth is that on the inside Obama has changed very little, which has caused the change in his looks and his demeanor, but not in his views. Since 2013 his world has been crumbling, but the world view that caused this has not been adjusted. He believes in foreign retreat and state regulation, and the results of these theories have been catastrophic. The petulance comes from his irritation that this has happened, and his eloquence has left him at the same moment, as every word he now says is a lie. They are lies because everything he thought of as true has been proven wrong by events which he cannot believe, so he tries to say otherwise. He spent his first term sowing the seeds of disaster and the second denying that anything happened. And the pretense is now wearing thin.