The one person who can stand up to Donald Trump isn’t Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton – or even Ted Cruz. It’s President Barack Obama.



In his final State of the Union on Tuesday, Obama didn’t settle for running down a list of accomplishments or even outlining what policies he’d like to see enacted in the coming year. Instead he set his sights on the future of America, by focusing in part on who might be elected in November.

But rather than coming out as a surrogate for Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat, Obama defined himself more abstractly as against fear. It’s a clever move, implicating both Donald Trump and to a lesser extent Ted Cruz, who’ve in recent weeks capitalized on the politics of fear – both Americans’ economic anxieties and xenophobia – to drive their campaign messages home.

It’s the kind of insinuation that only a wordsmith could get away with, and so deft was his attack on the GOP’s frontrunners on Tuesday that he never even had to name them to invoke them.

Take the following: “We live in a time of extraordinary change,” Obama began; it’s not the first time America has been through such changes, and each time, we’ve acted anew.

“We did not, in the words of Lincoln, adhere to the ‘dogmas of the quiet past,’” Obama added, “Instead we thought anew, and acted anew.”

Though his rhetoric was lofty and seemingly above the fray, the jab at Trump was clear. By encouraging Americans to be forward-looking and -thinking, he positioned himself as diametrically opposed to Trump, whose tagline – “Make America great again” – would have us all look backward for our solutions, to our “dogmas of the past”.

It’s all a matter of perspective, of course, and Obama wants the lines between him and Trump drawn clearly whether on national security, immigration or the economy. “The future we want – opportunity and security for our families; a rising standard of living and a sustainable, peaceful planet for our kids – all that is within our reach,” Obama continues. “But it will only happen if we work together. It will only happen if we can have rational, constructive debates.”

Here a call for rational debates isn’t just a dig at a gridlocked Congress, though it certainly is that; it’s also a comment the Republican debates, one of which is on Thursday and which have previously devolved into schoolyard-style insult hurling. This time, Obama suggests, he is hoping that we’ll see something a bit more constructive: “Our public life withers when only the most extreme voices get attention,” the president lamented. (Again: he was talking about Trump.)

In other places, Obama was even less subtle in his jabs. His reference to Trump’s bigoted call to ban all Muslims from entering the country was, at best, thinly veiled: “When politicians insult Muslims, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer.”

That was uncannily similar to an argument put forth by Hillary Clinton in a recent debate, when she said Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric was actively being used in recruitment videos byterrorists. (Though that particular claim wasn’t immediately demonstrable, we now know that some terrorists are indeed doing precisely that.) By not defining tolerance and acceptance of Muslims as a stance against Trump or for Hillary, Obama can take Clinton’s side but be principled, not partisan.

If he can successfully build support for an anti-Trump brand of politics, Obama will have accomplished what nobody on the Democratic or Republican side has been able to do: take down Trump. Jeb Bush, upon embarking on that mission quickly became laughing stock; Cruz’s strategy has relied on appeasement; even Clinton, the supposed powerhouse in the race, backed off her Trump offensive when he attacked her husband’s sexual history post schlong-gate.

However, Clinton wasn’t the only beneficiary of tonight’s debate: Bernie Sanders also had an advocate in Obama tonight, when he backed the senator up on everything from the link between climate change and national security to a discussion of the perils of American-driven regime change (an issue on which Sanders has sparred with Clinton).

Obama’s building up of Democratic candidates isn’t altruism: Hillary Clinton has been actively campaigning on upholding many aspects of Obama’s legacy, including recently announcing her intent to see that his newest gun control measures remain the law of the land. Before that, she promised to build upon the historic climate deal the president helped facilitate in Paris; Sanders said he’d take that foundation but go much further.

A vote for another Democratic presidency is a vote to protect Obama’s legacy, and he didn’t shy away from calling people to the polls. “Our collective future depends on your willingness to uphold your obligations as a citizen,” he said, tellingly speaking more to Americans than the members of Congress assembled for the State of The Union.

Though Obama never once mentioned Clinton by name, his presence from afar could make the best campaign trail surrogate yet for Clinton. On Tuesday, we may just have seen the beginnings of his stump speech; title it: “Against fear.”