Who is Most to Blame for Donald Trump's Presidency?

There are many people we can point to whose careers helped elect Donald Trump: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, both Bushes, Hilary Clinton, etc. But Barack Obama must accept the largest share of the responsibility for his election.

Obama clearly ran posing as a progressive and was elected twice for that reason, but he was not progressive at all in many areas. Some will argue that Republicans controlled the House and Senate in his last six years, and that is certainly true, but Obama himself made the decisions that caused that to happen and which caused millions of voters to go for Trump in 2016.

Even before he was elected, when the proposal to bail out banks and other large financial institutions was failing to pass the House, Obama flew back to DC from the campaign trail to successfully lobby the Congressional Black Caucus to change their votes. I remember a feeling of total outrage at the time because a candidate who claimed to want to make things better was doing the opposite.

Then, immediately after his inauguration, he chose three Wall Street Neo-Liberals to run the US economy. They could have tried to bail out families suffering from the mortgage crisis, but they refused to do so. He and his attorney general refused to prosecute financial criminals who were directly responsible for the 2008 crash and who caused tremendous suffering to millions of people. They also refused to prosecute the CIA torturers, one of whom now leads the CIA. Obama began drone assassinations. Obama deported large numbers of immigrants. He continually tried to make deals with Republicans and always moved toward their positions. For all these and other related reasons (I could go on at great length about foreign policy outrages in Honduras, Libya, etc.), his party lost control of Congress.

Millions of working class voters, who had lost their jobs and who had zero opportunities to find new decent ones, felt betrayed, and justifiably so. Along comes Hilary Clinton, with the same policies (and even more hawkish on pursuing imperial wars) and lacking Obama's charisma. Trump pretends to be the savior of the working class, and those millions believe him. He unites the extreme right and parlays that to electoral college victory.

Those voters still have those grievances; Trump has not benefitted them at all. They can be won back by a candidate, such as Bernie Sanders, who makes a clean break with decades of Democratic Neo-Liberalism, which includes Obama. They will not vote for the latest darling of Neo-Liberalism, whether that is Biden, Buttigieg, or Bloomberg. That means that those candidates likely cannot win the swing states needed to win the Electoral College.

All that is why I point the finger without hesitation at Barack Obama for being the single person most responsible for the election of Donald Trump. That is the rotten fruit of the lesser evil strategy, and it is time to abandon that strategy for the complete failure it has produced.