For reasons too numerous to count, President Donald J. Trump will go down in history as a world-historic leader who defied the odds at every turn.
Trump's 2016 election was a stunning rebuke to both his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and his predecessor, Barack Obama. Amazingly enough, so is his (alleged) defeat in the 2020 election.
In addition to undoing the vast majority of Obama's legacy, Trump is on track to receive more than 71 million votes in this year's election. That means more people will have voted for Trump in 2020 than voted for Obama in the 2008 (69 million) and 2012 (66 million) elections.
The nature of Trump's (alleged) defeat is also rather embarrassing for the former president. His opponent this time around, Joe Biden, wanted to run for president in 2016. His boss, Obama, talked him out of it. According to the New York Times, Obama "quietly pressured Mr. Biden to sit out the race, partly because he believed Mrs. Clinton had a better chance of building on his agenda."
We all know how that turned out. Obama's legacy would be forever altered by this ill-advised piece of advice. Biden's apparent victory in 2020 strongly suggests that Hillary Clinton is the only American eligible to run for president who is capable of losing an election to Donald Trump.
For whatever reason, Obama just doesn't seem to have a high opinion of his former running mate. Despite being multimillionaires, Obama and his wife Michelle declined to donate to the Biden campaign. A recently released excerpt from Obama's forthcoming memoir—regarding the effort to pass Obamacare—contained 13,000 words, only one of which was "Biden."
That would explain why in 2019, with Hillary out of the picture, Obama tried once again to talk Biden out of running for president. "You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t," Obama reportedly told him. Additional reporting suggests Obama continued to express a lack of confidence in his former colleague.
For example, Obama reportedly told one 2020 candidate that Biden "doesn't really have it" and is also said to have warned a fellow Democrat: "Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up." Biden isn't necessarily a huge fan of his former boss, either. After getting no credit for passing healthcare reform, Biden vowed to replace it with "Bidencare," a plan that "will, in fact, provide for. . .affordable healthcare."
As for Hillary, it must be absolutely devastating to watch Joe Biden (allegedly) accomplish the only thing she has ever wanted in her entire life. Not only that, but he did so by beating the man who defeated her four years earlier, when her entire legacy was transformed in a matter of hours—from presumptive first female president in history to failed candidate who ushered in the Trump era.
When historians look back on the past several years, the Democratic Party's insistence on nominating Hillary in 2016 is likely to go down as one of the stupidest decisions of the 21st century.
Thanks, Obama.