Analysis: By the standards Trump set in his 2012 ‘Obama is fired’ video, Trump would have fired himself
The video was intended to air during the Republican convention that year, leveraging Trump's tagline from "The Apprentice."
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The imminent release of a memoir written by President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen drew new attention to a weird footnote from the 2012 campaign: a video produced by Trump in which he “fires” then-president Barack Obama.
It was intended to air during the Republican convention that year, leveraging Trump’s tagline from “The Apprentice.” Trump, you may recall, had flirted with a 2012 campaign, ultimately deciding against it, but even his limited exploration of the idea gave him an elevated presence in Republican politics. The video ended up not being shown after the convention was truncated by a Gulf Coast hurricane, a development that doesn’t seem to have been particularly disappointing to staffers for the party’s nominee that year.
A few months later, though, it surfaced, published by the Trump-friendly site Breitbart. From there it made its way to the mainstream media, including an airing on the “Today” show (the network for which Trump’s “Apprentice” was still airing). In a moment when Trump was still just the TV guy — and a source of some ridicule — it was a goofy lark, not anything central to the public conversation.
But watching the video now is revelatory. It’s Trump, making the case to an Obama impersonator for why Obama doesn’t deserve a second term. And the metrics he uses to make that case are ones against which Trump himself now fares particularly poorly.
Trump begins by deriding “Obama’s” lack of management experience.
“You oversee budgets and you were never responsible for making a payroll or signing paychecks,” Trump says in the video, which is still available online. “You’ve really never balanced anything, certainly not your own budget.”
Obama took office in the middle of the steepest recession since the Great Depression. The government had begun spending massive amounts of money even before he took office to bolster the economy; during Obama’s first four years in office, the country ran deficits of more than $1 trillion.
But in Obama’s second term, those deficits shrank. Each year of Trump’s first three years in office, in fact, saw larger deficits than any year of Obama’s second term, with the exception that the deficit in 2017 was slightly smaller than that in 2013.
In 2012, the deficit was about $1.1 trillion. Last year, without the prompt of a steep recession, it was nearly $1 trillion.
“Now, your golf swing is good, but I know you get to play a lot,” Trump continues, elucidating what was apparently the second-most important problem with Obama’s presidency. “And for all that you play, you should have a much more upright finish. You’d be much better at the game.”
As president, of course, Trump has played far more golf than Obama. By The Washington Post’s count, he’s played 244 rounds, compared with 111 during Obama’s first term in office. Trump’s White House doesn’t confirm his playing in the way that Obama’s White House did, so we’re often left having to confirm Trump’s play through social media reports or telephoto imagery. Even with that caveat, though, 138 rounds have been confirmed.
None of Obama’s rounds, of course, were played at courses he owns, since he doesn’t own any. All but two of Trump’s were at Trump Organization properties, contributing to the large amount of government money that’s made its way to Trump’s private businesses.
The quality of Obama’s play is somewhat subjective, but it does bear noting that Trump is a well-known golf cheat.
“Just recently, you said, ‘the private sector is doing fine,’ ” Trump continues in the 2012 video. “The private sector is dying!”
There are currently fewer people working in the private sector than at any point since early 2015. Small businesses are being hammered, as evidenced by the possibility that a third of small businesses in New York might have to close.
This is a function of the coronavirus pandemic, of course, but, then, Obama’s position in 2012 was a function of the recession. One can argue that the state of the economy then was the result of what Obama did well or poorly — but, then, one can say the same of the state of the economy now, six months into the pandemic.
“Oh, you have a new slogan: ‘We have to move forward,’ ” Trump says after mocking Obama’s 2008 motto centered on “hope and change.” “In your case, really, that’s a lot better than having the people look back because it hasn’t been a pretty period.”
Trump briefly had a new slogan, too: “Keep America Great.” But, given the state of things at the moment, he’s largely reverted to his slogan from four years ago. America was great for a bit less than a year, per Trump; now it must be made great again.
“Now, you’re a really good speaker. I love the way you speak,” Trump then says to “Obama.” “But talk is cheap. We’ve got to get results. Without results, it all doesn’t matter?”
“There’s no reason for keeping important information away from people that hired you,” he continues. “Frankly, it makes us worry whether or not we can trust you at all.”
This was an unsubtle reference to Trump’s evolving birtherism. At first, he insisted that Obama should release his birth certificate to prove he was born in the United States, which Obama did. So, Trump shifted his conspiracy theory to claim that Obama needed to release his college records, implying either that Obama either benefited from affirmative action or had been identified as a foreign student.
The irony here, of course, is that Trump has himself refused to release important information: his tax returns. In fact, he’s done so in a broad divergence from past practice and has repeatedly gone to court to keep his returns private. What’s more, we learned from a book written by Trump’s niece that he likely used underhanded tactics to gain admission to the prestigious university he himself attended.
“There are fewer people working today than when you took office,” Trump then says in the video. “And certainly, that is a change. So you are right about that.”
At the time of Trump’s video, the number of people working in the United States was actually up from where it had been when Obama took office, albeit only barely.
The number of people working in the United States now is down 3 percent from the figure when Trump was inaugurated, with 4.7 million fewer people employed.
“You spent $787 billion on a stimulus plan promising unemployment would go to 6 percent,” Trump continues. “We have a problem. Today, it’s 8.3 percent.”
The unemployment rate was under 5 percent by the time Obama left office. It is currently 8.4 percent.
“You’ve run up almost as much debt as every other president combined,” Trump says next.
By the time Trump made his video, the country had added about $5.3 trillion in debt, an increase of about 47.7 percent since Obama had taken office.
Since Trump took office, the country has added about $6.6 trillion in debt, an increase of 33 percent.
“You jammed an expensive, convoluted health-care system down our throat,” Trump then says, referring to the Affordable Care Act. “How much can one group of people take?”
Repealing and replacing the ACA was a centerpiece of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He and congressional Republicans tried to eliminate it in 2017, without success. Trump has since repeatedly insisted that his administration would unveil a wonderful replacement bill, without doing so. (The most recently promised unveiling date was the end of August of this year.)
“The bottom line is we want results,” Trump says as the video nears its crescendo. “China and virtually every other country throughout the world is laughing at us. They take advantage of us. They think we’re run by a bunch of fools.”
International views of the United States have declined since Trump took office — but views of the American president have fallen much further.
“President Obama,” Trump says, winding up to the big conclusion: “You’re fired.”
The Obama impersonator, deflated, makes his way our of Trump’s office in Trump Tower. Fired because of the federal debt, and because of poor employment numbers, and because of the risks posed to private business, and because of his failure to meet his campaign slogan, and because of all of his golf playing.
In the video, Trump didn’t mention the nearly 13,000 people who died in the H1N1 pandemic under Obama. Given how his other criticisms held up, that’s probably for the best.
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