Inside a stunned White House, the President considers his legacy and America’s future in an ex post facto world
During the days immediately before and after the presidential election that shocked much of the world, The New Yorker’s David Remnick was spending time with President Obama. The president reflected on many topics, including one that almost everyone else is talking about too. Real vs Fake news.
“An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”
This is about a lot more than politics. Welcome to an ex post facto world, where, as Obama explains, “everything is true and nothing is true.”
Obama’s insistence on hope felt more willed than audacious. It spoke to the civic duty he felt to prevent despair not only among the young people in the West Wing but also among countless Americans across the country. At the White House, as elsewhere, dread and dejection were compounded by shock. Administration officials recalled the collective sense of confidence about the election that had persisted for many months, the sense of balloons and confetti waiting to be released. Last January, on the eve of his final State of the Union address, Obama submitted to a breezy walk-and-talk interview in the White House with the “Today” show. Wry and self-possessed, he told Matt Lauer that no matter what happened in the election he was sure that “the overwhelming majority” of Americans would never submit to Donald Trump’s appeals to their fears, that they would see through his “simplistic solutions and scapegoating.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency