How to wreck a presidency
Trump redefines the second-term curse
“The days are long, the weeks are long, the months are long,” wrote Ben Rhodes, in his memoir of life as a staffer in the Barack Obama White House. “But the years are short—one day you look up and realize you’re on the precipice of the final year of a presidential term.”
Many of the normal rules applying to the American presidency don’t seem to hold true in Donald Trump’s second term, but the one limiting factor that clearly remains is the clock. Barring extraordinary events, Trump is hurtling toward a time limit, the two-term maximum set by the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution.
As he does, he is discovering how hard it is maintain control over an administration and to shape the political agenda when everyone can see the end date approaching. Trump wasn’t fooling most people this week when he drowsily presided over another cabinet meeting where fawning officials praised him and the president continued to balk at the idea that voters were seeking “affordability.”
Already some of the realities that have weighed on two-term presidents before are beginning to set in for Trump. One is the voters. Given Trump’s unpopularity, November’s off-year election triumphs for Democrats (and the significantly narrower margin of victory for the Republican candidate in Tuesday’s special election in Tennessee) may presage a broad midterm defeat that could end Republican control of the House, if not the Senate.
The slavish deference GOP legislators have shown Trump is showing signs of cracking — most obviously in the congressional vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, a measure Trump opposed until he realized that he couldn’t stop it. Trump’s signature policies are at risk of being limited or reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which is considering cases challenging the president’s ability to unilaterally impose tariffs, deport migrants and send National Guard troops into American cities.
His effort to end Russia’s war on Ukraine appears stalled. His administration’s lethal strikes on boats leaving Venezuela are increasingly being challenged as illegal. The fate of his pressure campaign to oust that nation’s president Nicolás Maduro is uncertain.
Second-term curse?
Trump is only the second president to serve non-continuous terms in the White House. The first was Grover Cleveland. When he took the oath of office on March 4, 1893, his party, the Democrats, held control of Congress as well as the White House. Yet that didn’t ensure success for the president. A financial crisis erupted, leading to the closing of 600 banks and a depression with an unemployment rate of 19 percent. Cleveland wasn’t up to the task of rescuing the economy. He left the White House at the end of his term as an unpopular figure.
In the nearly 130 years since, more second-term presidents than not have run aground, either over scandals or glaring cases of incompetence — among them, Richard Nixon and Watergate, Ronald Reagan and Iran/Contra, Bill Clinton and lying about his affair with a White House intern, George W. Bush and Hurricane Katrina, plus the global financial crisis. These are some of the examples cited by believers in the idea of a “second-term curse.”
And then there was President Barack Obama’s second term — which offers a particularly revealing case study of the pressures that can set in, as well as some insight into how presidents can avoid the deepest pitfalls.
As John Harwood wrote for the New York Times in January, 2016, a year before Obama left office, his second term was shaping up to compare favorably with that of many of his predecessors.
“Mr. Obama has overseen shrinking unemployment, a reduction in the proportion of Americans without health insurance and diplomatic breakthroughs on trade, climate policy, relations with Cuba and Iran’s nuclear program.”
From the vantage point of 2025, those Obama accomplishments still look impressive, but it’s hard to see his second term as an unqualified success. He did compile an enviable economic record and was able to make Obamacare a lasting feature of the U.S. health care system. He left office with an approval rating of about 60%, at least 15 points higher than Trump’s rating now. Yet on “trade, climate policy, relations with Cuba and Iran’s nuclear program,” every one of Obama’s achievements has been reversed by his successor, Donald Trump.
Obama’s calm, determined and clinical leadership style positioned him to steer the government toward favorable outcomes. Yet, as his party discovered, it is in the nature of democracy and polarized politics that hard-won successes often don’t last. Obama’s second term was like a finely constructed sandcastle subject to ruin from the first large wave.
Diary of an idealist
At the age of 29, Ben Rhodes joined the Obama campaign as a speechwriter in 2007 and served as deputy national security adviser during both of the president’s terms in office. He had a master’s degree in fiction writing (a fact Republicans would cite to question his credibility) and five years of experience working for Rep. Lee Hamilton.
His aptly titled book, The World As It Is, is a candid account of the highs and lows of the Obama presidency. Rhodes comes across in the early years as a bit naive, someone who wants to believe his job is mostly about accomplishing good things while he increasingly comes to terms with all of the compromises he has to make along the way.
Rhodes is an unabashed fan of his boss, though he does lose patience with Obama at times. You can understand why Obama inspires loyalty. He is even-keeled and at times, mischievously funny; he isn’t a control freak, but sets priorities and gives his aides free rein to carry them out.
Obama celebrates the passage of the Affordable Care Act with a martini on the Truman balcony, but is careful with his diet. At the end of one meeting-filled day at the United Nations General Assembly, Rhodes recalled, “Obama signaled for me to come in and eat dinner with him: his usual plate of salmon, brown rice, and steamed broccoli. The simplicity of his meals always said something about his discipline—food was something that sustained his health and energy in this job, not something to be enjoyed.”
Rhodes throws himself into the 24/7 job of deputy national security adviser. He becomes the staffer of last resort, the one who’s always available to fulfill Obama’s commands or defend his policies, whether it’s at the cost of a lost night of sleep, a busted family vacation, or another takeout dinner in a featureless room, eaten while the president dines in style with family and friends in a Martha’s Vineyard mansion. During his time working for Obama, he meets, and marries, Ann Norris, an aide to then-Sen. Barbara Boxer of California. Their first child Ella was born during the second term.
Rhodes is there in 2010 when an “enormous electoral wave” carries Republicans to control of the House, “a stinging repudiation of a two-year period in which Obama saved the global economy, passed a $1 trillion stimulus, reformed financial regulations, and passed healthcare legislation.”
His idealism suffers a shock when the promise of the Arab Spring fizzles out. He’s outraged by the public’s willingness to believe Obama’s foreign policy doctrine was “leading from behind,” a phrase attributed to an unnamed Obama adviser in a New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza. “Obama had never uttered the phrase, and he wouldn’t have used it to describe his own foreign policy,” Rhodes wrote.
A better description of the president’s approach to running the government would be “no-drama Obama.” And later, in his second term, Obama wouldn’t be shy about articulating a different doctrine: “Don’t do stupid shit.”
Nerd prom
Rhodes is a talented writer with a sly sense of humor. Take his comment on an annual Washington springtime event, sometimes derisively called the “nerd prom”: “Like a third-tier awards show, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is the kind of ritual that you complain about while desperately seeking an invitation.”
On May 1, 2011, President Obama was introduced at the correspondents’ dinner with a video set to the Hulk Hogan theme: “I am a real American, fight for the rights of every man.” Interspersed in the video, amid patriotic and sports scenes, are repeated shots of Obama’s birth certificate showing he had been born in Hawaii.
The president was spiking the football, and he had every right to do so. Donald Trump had relentlessly pushed the bogus claim that Obama was born outside the U.S. and was thus unqualified for the presidency. With the release of Obama’s long-form birth certificate on April 27, 2011, the evidence was conclusive: Trump’s racist smear against Obama was completely false.
In his speech at the correspondents dinner, Obama “slowly worked his way around to Trump: ‘Donald Trump is here tonight!’ Just saying the words brought laughter and applause,” wrote Rhodes.
Then, Obama said, “No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald, and that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter—like, did we fake the moon landing.”
Seth Meyers followed Obama to the podium and didn’t miss the chance to roast Trump either. “Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke,” said Meyers. (Perhaps Trump never got over the rebuke from Meyers. In a Truth Social post Nov. 15 this year, he said Meyers’ show is a “ratings DISASTER” and he should be fired “IMMEDIATELY!”)
At the Washington Hilton that night in 2011, a relaxed Obama appeared to give no hint that the most important military operation of his presidency was taking place in Pakistan that weekend. Obama gambled on an intelligence community assessment that the 9/11 terror mastermind Osama bin Laden had likely been hiding out in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Obama ordered special forces to stage a helicopter raid, for which the troops had carefully prepared. They attacked the building and killed bin Laden, an outcome most Americans sought in retribution for the nearly 3,000 Americans who died in the al Qaeda terror attacks of September 11.
After the bin Laden raid, it was reasonable to think Obama’s presidency was on a roll. As Rhodes wrote:
In the spring of 2011, Barack Obama’s story was gaining a certain momentum. A hundred thousand troops had left Iraq. The economy had stabilized. Healthcare reform was law. Bin Laden was dead. Obama had largely done the most important things that he said he was going to do. The United States could pivot from saving our economy to assembling the pieces of a new foundation. The war in Afghanistan was about to turn to deescalation. The Arab Spring held out the promise that positive change could be forced upon the world by the frustrated masses.
But then Rhodes shows how events spin out of the Obama team’s control, as the resignation of Hosni Mubarak as Egypt’s dictator led to a short-lived regime led by the Muslim Brotherhood which ultimately was ousted by a military coup.
The overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, accomplished without putting US troops on the ground, turned out to be a political negative for Obama, as a result of the controversy stirred up by Republicans over the death of two Americans in Benghazi.
The ensuing congressional investigation proved painful and politically costly to Rhodes. He had drafted talking points for Susan Rice to use on Sunday talk shows that made it seem the attack on U.S. diplomats was a reaction to an anti-Muslim video, rather than terrorism. At least he followed the good advice he received to buy liability insurance that saved him $100,000 in legal fees connected to the congressional investigations.
Diplomatic triumphs and defeats
Ben Rhodes had a hand in two genuine diplomatic breakthroughs in the second term. He personally helped negotiate the normalization of relations with Cuba. And when Obama’s team reached the nuclear deal with Iran, Rhodes led the effort to prevent Congress from overturning it. He put together a war room (or as he suggested, an anti-war room) of Obama aides to make the case for a negotiated settlement, and was later accused, without firm support, of spinning the agreement deceptively.
He had come a long way from the Ben Rhodes who seemed surprised that Obama was held to account for saying chemical weapons use by Syria’s regime would constitute a “red line” in 2012 and then failing to act on it when the Assad regime killed hundreds in 2013.
So much of the political fallout in Obama’s second term appears opportunistic and ultimately trivial against the backdrop of the larger forces that reshaped US society during the president’s years in office: the social media revolution, the weakening of traditional media, the growing polarization among voters, the resentment over inequality and the failure to hold people accountable for financial practices that triggered the Great Recession.
The divide between voters who went to college and those who didn’t became a yawning gulf in American society and the best predictor of how people will vote. These trends, plus the ham-handed intervention of FBI Director James Comey regarding an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, helped set the stage for Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.
On election night, Rhodes was at a fellow staffer’s house in Washington.
I drank warming beer and occasionally walked into the kitchen to eat lo mein, standing at the counter. For long stretches of time, we said nothing to each other, together in a room, alone with our thoughts. So many things I had worked on—from Iran to Cuba to climate change—were now at risk. It was all happening too fast to digest; it seemed as if it couldn’t be real, that the country—and world—could turn that abruptly from the story of the last eight years to the brand of racist, mean-spirited, truthless politics that had shadowed us since 2008. Everything was suddenly eclipsed; I felt enveloped in a darkness.
So much work had gone into the eight years of the Obama White House, but it seemed likely to vanish in a flash. Even a presidency that valued integrity and competence, one that didn’t grant pardons to swindlers and did not elevate people like Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to positions of power, was subject to the forces that erode an administration’s gains.
Somewhat maddeningly, Obama took refuge in a very long view of history when Trump won. Emailing Rhodes, Obama cited astronomer Carl Sagan’s observation: There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the earth’s beaches.
Rhodes’ conclusion wasn’t nearly as cosmic. “Trump was a product of the same forces I’d seen aligning against us for ten years,” he wrote. “Because Sarah Palin. The Tea Party. Benghazi. The irrelevance of facts. A healthy majority of Republicans still did not believe that Obama was born in the United States.”
“The Republicans had ridden this tiger, and we’d all ended up inside.”
Excellent piece. When is Ben coming on for a live?
Interesting reflection. One sometimes wonders whether the tyranny of the present gets the best of us. Once this present becomes past, it too, presumably, will feel like a wake growing distant, disappearing into the darkness. Forgotten, or half forgotten. Or will it? Will it dig in deeper, lock us up inside its anti-democratic logic, keep us chained there for longer than we thought? Or produce a counter-response, much like the counter-response produced by Obama in the form of Trump but in a new, (presumably) better direction. Like history, the future is mysterious. I know I have no clue.