The president-elect has targeted Barack Obama’s achievements on healthcare, climate change and more – but strategists say some progress can’t be turned back

Emotions will be as raw as the wind whipping off icy Lake Michigan. On Tuesday night, Barack Obama will stand before family, friends and supporters in his adopted hometown of Chicago to deliver a valedictory speech, looking back on the grace notes of his presidency – and forward to an uncertain future.

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It will be just over eight years since Obama addressed a rapturous crowd in the same city after being elected as America’s first black president. “Change has come to America,” he proclaimed to nearly a quarter of a million people in Grant Park.

Next week he will dig deep one last time for oratory to match the moment, but the euphoria that greeted him that night in 2008 will be tempered by the hardness of experience, a streak of wistfulness and, above all, a piercing fear about whether his legacy can survive the presidency of Donald Trump.

“I’ve had an opportunity to review a very early draft, and what I can tell you is that the president is interested in delivering a farewell address that’s forward-looking,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Friday.

“The president is obviously proud of the progress that we have made and continues to be optimistic about our future, and he’s looking forward to an opportunity to talk about why.”

But it was Obama himself who warned during the uniquely rancorous election campaign that “all the progress we’ve made is on the ballot”. Hillary Clinton lost on 8 November and now that progress is imperilled. Anyone seeking a metaphor need look no further than the White House vegetable garden, painstakingly tended by first lady Michelle Obama to promote healthy eating for children. It could now be dug up at the roots, both literally and figuratively.

There is barely a policy that might go untouched, from the economy to healthcare to education, from balancing the global order to combating climate change. In areas where Obama’s record is built on regulations and executive actions, Trump has the potential to hit a reverse gear without consent from Congress.

The world can also expect a fundamental shift in tone. Obama is a cerebral African American lawyer who sang Amazing Grace in memory of shooting victims in a black church and welcomed the multiracial cast of the musical Hamilton to the White House. Trump is a white, 70-year-old celebrity businessman whom critics describe as capricious, who questioned Obama’s birthplace and who made campaign pledges to round up illegal immigrants, ban or register Muslims and build a wall on the Mexican border.

“Fair to say that you’re going to take a wrecking ball to the Obama legacy?” the interviewer Chris Wallace asked Trump on Fox News Sunday recently. The president-elect insisted: “No, no, no, I don’t want to do that at all. I just want what’s right.”

His words and actions, however, appear to tell a different story. His close ally Newt Gingrich, speaking last month at the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing thinktank in Washington, insisted: “This is a genuine watershed.

“There is an old world that’s much deeper than just liberalism and there is the post-8 November world, if we can make it real. I tell everybody: the Trump rally has to be turned into the Trump reality.”

‘Trump has many more advantages’

Obama did not achieve everything he wanted to during two terms in the White House, notably failing to heal the partisan divide or halt Russian aggression in the deadly quagmire of Syria. But in his first year he did arguably stave off a new Great Depression and save the automotive industry. Unemployment, then in danger of touching 10%, is now at 4.7%.

Trump, who ran for president as a business expert and dealmaker, will have the luxury of not inheriting a financial crisis as Obama did.

“President Trump, not for the first time in his life, will inherit a much more financially beneficial situation,” Earnest said on Friday. “And he’ll have an opportunity to build on that momentum. So I think you can make a strong case that the standard that he should be held to is even higher. He’s got many more advantages. He’s got the wind at his back.”

Trump has vowed to cut taxes, eliminate regulations, scrap or renegotiate trade deals and punish companies that send jobs offshore. He has surrounded himself with arch capitalists, Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs.

Bill Burton, former deputy press secretary under Obama, said: “Trump has shown he has an economic vision not unlike Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, and those had negative consequences. Trickle-down economics still doesn’t work.”

The word “Obamaism” never quite took off, but the president can settle for “Obamacare”. His signature legislation came in health as he defied inertia and opposition to push through the Affordable Care Act. Despite its teething troubles, it has delivered health insurance to more than 20 million people, the administration says, with more than nine in 10 Americans insured for the first time in history.

But even before Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, Republicans in Congress this week set about Obamacare’s destruction. Vice-president-elect Mike Pence declared its repeal “the first order of business”, hinting that Trump could take action on his very first day in the Oval Office. The president-elect’s choice of health secretary, the Georgia congressman Tom Price, is an ardent critic of the law.

However, the difficulties of supplanting Obamacare could be seen as metaphor for supplanting his legacy as a whole. Pence and other Republicans failed to provide specific details of what its replacement will look like or how long the process will take. The House speaker, Paul Ryan, promised not to “pull the rug out” from under anyone, but the Urban Institute has estimated that the number of people without health insurance could more than double to 58.7 million, with the non-college-educated constituencies who typically voted for Trump the hardest hit.

The president-elect himself has acknowledged that some parts of the legislation might yet be preserved. Some Republicans appear to agree with him. Democrats warn of unprecedented chaos in America’s healthcare system. This battle is clearly just beginning.

‘America first’

Obama made a slow start on climate change but raced to catch up, notably with the Paris agreement, involving nearly 200 countries. He says America’s dependence on foreign oil has been cut by more than half, while its production of renewable energy has more than doubled. There has been a trebling of wind power and 30-fold increase in solar, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. The thriving clean energy industry would therefore be a difficult genie to put back in the bottle.

Trump is said to be looking at ways to extricate the US from the Paris agreement while aggressively exploiting fossil fuels. He has said that on his first day in office, he will lift “the restrictions on the production of $50tn worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal, and we will put our miners back to work”.

His nominees to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of the Interior question the science of human-caused climate change. Rex Tillerson, his choice for secretary of state, is head of the world’s biggest oil company, ExxonMobil. And the president-elect himself has previously claimed that climate change is a Chinese hoax. There are few legacy issues that could be more consequential.

Internationally, Obama won the Nobel peace prize in his first year and was the president who killed Osama bin Laden, struck the Iran nuclear deal and led a surprise rapprochement with Cuba. Trump has criticised the Iran deal but again may receive advice that it has merits worth protecting and feel pressure from international allies. He has vowed to put “America first”, apparently with Russia not far behind, upended relations with China before even taking office and raised fears of a conflict of interests with his business empire.

On nuclear defence, Trump threatened to preside over a major ramping up of the US arsenal in a tweet just before Christmas. Trump’s unrestrained language stands in sharp contrast to the stance adopted by Obama over the past eight years. Though Obama struggled to deliver on his early promise to oversee a significant reduction in the US nuclear arsenal, agreeing to a $1tn modernisation program over 30 years for air, land and sea delivery systems, he has adopted the vocabulary of disarmament.

‘An unparalleled grace and complexity’

Then there are questions of temperament, personality and how that can translate into soft power. “Poise”, “panache” and “dignity” are words commonly used about Obama. “Narcissist” and “vulgarian” have been applied to Trump. In this most polarised of countries, Trump’s friends and foes can agree on one thing: two men more unlike each other are hard to imagine.



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Neil Sroka, who worked as a new media director on Obama’s 2008 election campaign, said: “Overall, the legacy of Barack Obama will be millions of Americans remembering that’s what a president looks like and sounds like. That will stand in contrast to this billionaire bigot putting out insults on Twitter whenever he feels like it. Obama has given a voice to the American people with an unparalleled grace and complexity, and that’s not Donald Trump.”

Richard Danzig, navy secretary under President Bill Clinton, said: “President Obama’s greatest legacies are the measured rationality of his decision-making and the inclusiveness of his politics. President Trump will counter both.”

From the day he stepped into the Oval Office, one central Obama legacy was assured: he was the first African American president in the two-century-plus history of the republic. The symbolism mattered.

Writing in the Atlantic, the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates reflected: “Against the specter of black pathology, against the narrow images of welfare moms and deadbeat dads, his time in the White House had been an eight-year showcase of a healthy and successful black family spanning three generations, with two dogs to boot. In short, he became a symbol of black people’s everyday, extraordinary Americanness.”

Trump was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. His chief strategist, Steve Bannon of Breitbart News, has been accused of fanning white nationalism, a charge he denies. The Trump cabinet is dominated by older white men. Loretta Lynch, an African American woman, will be replaced as attorney general by Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, a senator for Alabama named for a Confederate president and general. Sessions’ long career includes accusations of racist comments and crackdowns on immigrants. Sessions angrily denied the racism allegations at the time. Activists are braced for a shift toward hardline policing and criminal justice enforcement.

Gingrich – whose 1994 “Contract with America” is blamed by many for the hyperpartisanship of today’s politics – told the Heritage Foundation the president-elect thought “we should speak bluntly and deliberately and methodically break up political correctness”. He also mocked Obama for failing to condemn Colin Kaepernick, an American football player who has been staging protests during the US national anthem in an attempt to highlight racial injustice.

“We should be sympathetic to the level of confusion multimillionaire athletes have at a country that has treated them so badly that they only have seven Rolls Royces and three houses?” Gingrich said. “This is why the country voted for Trump, because they look at this kind of junk and they say, ‘OK, I’ve got these two futures: I get nutcake weirdness and I get normalcy.’

“And to the great shock of the Washington Post and New York Times, nutcake weirdness lost.”

‘I don’t think you can undo the march of progress’

All this … and a supreme court vacancy that Trump intends to fill with a hardline conservative, potentially threatening abortion rights and gun control for a generation. For some liberals, the potential erasure of the Obama White House is devastating. The president himself, however, has learned the hard way the limits of presidential power.

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He failed, for example, to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and felt helpless when 20 children and six adults were shot dead at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, four years ago. He argues that American government and democracy is an ocean liner, not a speedboat.

The political strategist Anita Dunn, Obama’s former White House communications director, said: “I don’t think you can undo the march of progress in the country. I think the view of America’s challenges always looks very different from inside the White House gates than it does outside during a transition or campaign.

“Obviously there are going to be some fights about trying to preserve some of the progressive policies the president has put into place, but I think the broader changes in this country aren’t things that you can turn back. You can’t turn back people’s attitudes on marriage or the need to address climate change even if we can differ about how to do it most effectively.”

Sroka, now communications director for the liberal campaign group Democracy for America, was more cautious but also believes that at least some of the legacy will endure.

“Obama’s policies are going to be far harder to untangle than many Republicans believe and far easier to untangle than many Democrats believe,” he said. “Obama spent eight years planting a complex shrub befitting a complex, measured, thoughtful president. Trump is going to take a chainsaw to it but won’t be able to kill it at the roots.”

As he spends the weekend polishing his farewell address – an elegiac tradition dating back to George Washington – the man who once asked a nation to believe in the audacity of hope will now have to put his faith in the tenacity of hope.