The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

by Ben Rhodes

Ever conscious of the norms of his office, Obama dutifully urged his counterparts to give the new administration a chance. “Wait and see,” he told them.

We've waited...and we've seen

We prefer to have a good relationship with the United States, he said, folding his hands in front of him. That is good for the world. But every action will have a reaction. And if an immature leader throws the world into chaos, then the world will know whom to blame.

“History doesn’t move in a straight line,” he’d say, “it zigs and zags.”

“But we’re about to find out just how resilient our institutions are, at home and around the world.”

The Iraq War disturbed other countries—including U.S. allies—in its illogic and destruction, and accelerated a realignment of power and influence that was further advanced by the global financial

Yet American politics pushes military interventionism, even as public opinion is wary. In the aftermath of 9/11, it became an imperative for politicians to demonstrate that they were tough on terrorism, with the measure of toughness being a willingness to use military force or flout the rule of

“Did you do anything wrong?” he asked. It was, I realized, the first time anyone had ever bothered to ask me that question. “No,” I said. “Then don’t worry about it,” he said. “All you have is your integrity. And you have as much integrity as anyone I know.”

What are the chances that Trump has asked this question if anybody in the WH or in his orbit?

Speaking in paragraphs, he tied together Putin, the emergence of right-wing political parties in Europe, and ISIL. These are people, he said, who fundamentally reject the legitimacy of the liberal order. They are looking for another form of legitimacy—one that is counter to our notion of progress.

“It’s obviously manifest in different ways, but people always look to tear down an ‘other’ when they need legitimacy—immigrants, gays, minorities, other countries.”

Trump figured out how to capitalize on these sentiments

After years of Mitch McConnell’s obstructionism, Fox News’s vilification, and growing tribalism at home and abroad, he had priced in the shortcomings of the world as it is, picking the issues and moments when he could press for the world that ought to be.

On the plane leaving Beijing, Obama—who had spent six years methodically investing in clean energy, changing fuel efficiency standards and enhancing environmental protections without congressional support—took note of China’s ability to make a snap decision that could transform their economy. “They can send a signal and remake their energy sector,” he said. “We can’t even build an airport.”

This, I thought, is a guy who is out of fucks.

“As Joe Biden would say, this is a big fucking deal,”

Ted Cruz, gearing up for a presidential run, denounced Obama—who had waged war as commander in chief every day of his presidency—as “an apologist for radical Islamic terrorists.”

Fuck Ted Cruz. Fuck him straight to hell.

This type of interference in American foreign policy—a foreign leader invited to lobby the U.S. Congress against the policy of a sitting president—would have been unthinkable in 2009. But by 2015, Netanyahu had become almost a de facto member of the Republican caucus, and Republicans had abandoned any norms about working with a foreign government to undermine the policies of a sitting president.

A TEN-DAY STRETCH IN June encapsulated both the events that ensured Obama’s presidency would be a historic success and the clouds that would hover over his legacy.

Coupled with healthcare, it felt as if the outlines of a successful presidency were coming into focus.

As was often the case in black churches, he fell into a more rhythmic style, feeding off the crowd, a man far more welcome there than he had ever been in Congress.

“God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind,” Obama said. “He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves. We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency and shortsightedness and fear of each other—but we got it all the same.”

As Obama neared the end of the prepared text, he described the dignity of the victims, the grace in their lives that could heal the hate in America. “If we can tap that grace,” he said, “everything can change. Amazing grace. Amazing grace.” I

An organ was playing, people were giving praise in the audience, and in that instant I was reminded that there were people, good people, kind people out there in the world who were more important than any of the petty controversies that enveloped us every day, people who understood who Obama was and what he had been trying to do, people whose support could allow him to stand there, in the middle of his seventh year as president, and be totally open in a way that I had almost never seen him be in public before. It was always hard to explain what it was that I most admired about this complicated man. Watching him, I felt that I would never have to explain it to anyone again.

He then started reciting the list, punctuated by organ chords, of the names of every one of the victims, a stratagem that managed to do something I had never seen before, as the entire life of each person was celebrated, vindicated, and elevated by the short, declarative words that he spoke:

Then it was over, this moment that had opened up a window into something—into Obama; into a better America than the one I lived in every day, into a purer sense of what we were all doing, as people who worked for him, what we were a part of, what kept me coming back to work all these years. I sat at my desk, the White House feed on my television now an empty blue screen, and for the first time in many years, I sobbed.

“ ‘Dear Mr. President,’ ” he began to read aloud. “ ‘I used to not like you because of the color of your skin. My whole life I have hated people because of the color of their skin. I have thought about things since those nine people were killed and I realize I was wrong. I want to thank you for everything you are trying to do to help people.’

Yet some deal opponents started to make a new charge: that Obama and his team were anti-Semites, conjuring up stereotypes of moneyed Jewish interests propelling us into a war.

“I know it’s easy to play on people’s fears, to magnify threats, to compare any attempt at diplomacy to Munich, but none of these arguments hold up,” he said. “They didn’t back in 2002, in 2003, they shouldn’t now. That same mindset, in many cases offered by the same people, who seem to have no compunction about being repeatedly wrong, led to a war that did more to strengthen Iran, more to isolate the United States, than anything we have done in the decades before or since.”

“When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted,” Obama had said, “that’s shameful. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

The Mexicans were our closest neighbor, and they liked to say of themselves, “So close to America, so far from God.”

As the outskirts of Havana came into view—thatched houses and corrugated shacks—Obama said, “That doesn’t look like a threat to our national security to me.”

More than any other diaspora community I’d engaged with, Cuban Americans saw themselves as a people in exile.

Jim Acosta, the same reporter who had asked Obama why he didn’t get the bastards, stood up and said, “My father is Cuban. He left for the United States when he was young. Do you see a new and democratic direction for your country? And why do you have Cuban political prisoners?”

Being there, in Havana, with this group of people who’d become like a second family, I felt better than I ever had before in my job. This is why you put up with everything.

You live your life knowing that the story out there about who you are is different from the person you think you are, and want to be.

It was as if simply recognizing complexities and context was tantamount to pulling a thread that could cause some American narrative to unravel. The faces of the people lining these streets told a different story. Surely what made America great to them was not the fact that we’d dropped the bomb; it was the ideal associated with who we were, the fact that we had a president who was willing to acknowledge difficult histories and show respect for different people. Our constant struggle to improve ourselves and our country while seeking guidance from the story of our founding values—that is what makes America great.

Nations arise telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats. But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different. The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth.

Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.

“I’m not certain of many things,” he said, “but I am certain of one. On my deathbed, I won’t be thinking about a bill I passed or an election I won or a speech I gave. I’ll be thinking about my daughters, and moments involving them.”

In a 2014 meeting, we showed him what, hypothetically, it would take to replicate something like RT—hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of people, and greater White House supervision. He laughed. “I’m sure the Republicans are going to sign off on giving me a billion-dollar propaganda channel.”

McConnell’s refusal was staggeringly partisan and unpatriotic in its disregard for a foreign adversary undermining our democracy. But the sad truth is that it wasn’t surprising in the context of the Republican Party of 2016, which had spent eight years disbanding norms and had circled the wagons behind a demagogue. Obama reflected this sense of exhaustion. “What else did you expect from McConnell?” he said.

We were at the center of power, ensconced in the White House. But we had less and less control over the political forces roiling the country—the toxic brand of nationalism on display at Trump rallies; a media that was increasingly broken into hermetically sealed, impenetrable partisan echo chambers; the obvious Russian efforts to influence our election that continued unabated. Even our scandals had moved on—Benghazi was no longer about Susan Rice’s Sunday show appearances, it was now about Hillary Clinton’s private email server, something to justify chants of “Lock her up.”

“So, that happened,” he said. He sounded surprised but as if he was trying to force himself to be subdued, like a man who just received an unexpected diagnosis and is trying to avoid getting too upset.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have seen it coming. Because when you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we’d run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used: She’s part of a corrupt establishment that can’t be trusted to bring change. Change we can believe in.

Walking over to my seat, I saw the words stitched into the ring around the carpet on the floor, the quote from Martin Luther King, whose bust watched silently from a table along the wall: THE ARC OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE IS LONG, BUT IT BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE.

Standing backstage before his press conference with Angela Merkel, I told him that it was probably the last time a U.S. president would defend the liberal international order for a while. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe this is what people want. I’ve got the economy set up well for him. No facts. No consequences. They can just have a cartoon.”

In giving advice on how to deal with Trump, he offered a simple maxim: “Find some high ground, and hunker down.”

Obama’s response to Russian meddling had scrupulously adhered to the norms and responsibilities of his office. Establish the facts. Have the intelligence community do the public warning in its own, carefully chosen

words. Protect the election infrastructure. Order a review of everything that happened. Stay in the lane of the rule of law and good governance; be impartial; don’t stray for a moment into the dirtier political space occupied by everybody else: the Russians, the Trump campaign, Wikileaks. This set limits on what he, or any of us, could do before the election—limits that, in hindsight, did not extend far enough to encompass the scale of the assault on our democracy. Yet that disposition also ensured the painstaking review that established the facts about what happened and raised additional questions about what the Trump campaign had done, which would endure long after we were gone. If Obama’s faith in norms and institutions is validated, then the truth will all come out, and consequences will flow from that.

Alejandro then expressed some hope for the Trump team: As recently as that summer, representatives from the Trump organization had traveled to Cuba to scout hotel opportunities.

I asked Raúl whether Cuba would have made itself America’s enemy—and the Soviet Union’s partner—if America had responded differently to the revolution. “We would not,” he said. “We just wanted to survive. It was your choice!”

My final note was to Obama. We had this debate, over the years, about whether individuals or social movements shape history—the kind of casual, esoteric conversation that filled in downtime in cars, helicopters, airplanes, or the quiet of the Oval Office. I had been on the side of social movements, dating back to the early days of the Arab Spring. “I was wrong,” I told him in my message. “You’ve made a difference in the lives of billions of people.”