Perhaps President Barack Obama started this self-righteous pity party when, according to his former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, Obama asked soon after Donald Trump won the 2016 election: “What if we were wrong? Maybe we pushed too far. Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” More pointedly, as Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times this year, “the president made it clear that what he meant was: What if we were wrong in being so right? What if we were too good for these people?” She was spot on. Obama and his team in the White House thought they were just too good to be effective. So here we are.