Ta-Nehisi Coates: Obama's Legacy in a Trump World

**Tim Miller** (0:12)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I have an exciting guest for a pre-taped Juneteenth show. I'm going to the Bayou tomorrow, so we're taping this on Thursday afternoons of Donald Trump, I don't know, decides to invade Cote d'Ivoire or something between now and then. We'll get to that on Monday's show. In the meantime, he's a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. He's a Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard. He's an author with a bunch of works, including We Were Eight Years Empowered, American Tragedy about the Obama Presidency, and it's Ta-Nehisi Coates. Hey, man.
Hey, hey.

**Ta-Nehisi Coates** (0:47)
Thanks for having me.

**Tim Miller** (0:48)
Welcome back. You wrote a bunch of other books. You wrote too many books for me to list them all.

**Ta-Nehisi Coates** (0:53)
I hate when people do that. You don't even got to list any of the books, honestly.

**Tim Miller** (0:57)
Well, I just picked out one because it's relevant today. As we're taping, the festivities at the opening of the Obama Library are ending. We've had some speeches from the former president, First Lady, and others on May Play Club for a minute.
I assume you do have Obama legacy takes, and you wrote the book. It's been a bit now, and so there's been more time to stew in the aftermath. I'm just wondering what hops to mind today on the opening of the library.

**Ta-Nehisi Coates** (1:26)
Does he watch this show? The president?
Yes, I have to tailor my remarks.

**Tim Miller** (1:32)
I have no evidence that he does, which is unfortunate because I've been trying to get him on. I've been trying to get him on. And I don't know why he won't do it. But I do think he has some friends who listen. So if you're hearing this now, I would love to have him on and have a growing respect for him every year.
Ta-Nehisi might be going the other direction.

**Ta-Nehisi Coates** (1:54)
I don't know.

**Tim Miller** (1:54)
We'll hear.

**Ta-Nehisi Coates** (1:56)
No, I bet he does listen. This is his sort of podcast, actually.

**Tim Miller** (2:01)
Kind of, which is why it's upsetting he's not on. I agree with you.

**Ta-Nehisi Coates** (2:06)
No, this is a sweet spot, man. Do I have, what was the question again?

**Tim Miller** (2:09)
Updated legacy thoughts. I mean, he's opening the library.

**Ta-Nehisi Coates** (2:12)
Oh, yeah. No. I mean, my thing on him is pretty much what it was at the time. And it was that only like, Barack Obama could have been the first black president. Only somebody like him could have been the first black president. And what I mean by that is someone who had the kind of historical background wherein they had been in intimate spaces with a white parent, white grandparents, who had treated him as equal, who were not racist themselves. And I guess he would say extended white family also. Raised in Hawaii, which is not to say that Hawaii is like a non-racist paradise, but certainly a place. I've been to Hawaii and the black-white dynamic is not the major thing going on there, as it would have been in Chicago had he been raised there. And so what I've thought is that that just gave him a very, very different perspective and allowed him to see the best and the largest voting population in this country. I think he communicated that. And I think there really was no other way that you were going to see a black president.
Unfortunately, I think the downside of that was, I don't think he could have imagined the past 10 years.
I don't think that was really possible for him. He could have imagined Trump winning and then Trump winning again too, you know? I mean, maybe by 24, he could imagine it happening again. But I certainly think the first time he just could.

**Tim Miller** (3:47)
How does that lack of imagination, like what did not having that ability to imagine that? I guess that was me too.
How did that leave his presidency like poor or reflect on his presidency?

**Ta-Nehisi Coates** (3:58)
I think he did not see the vulnerability of it. It's so much harder to build things than it is to destroy things.
Trump excels at destroying. Doge was easy. That's easy. You went to presidency, you should bring somebody in, you know what I mean, to destroy.

**Tim Miller** (4:12)
Well, he didn't save any money.

**Ta-Nehisi Coates** (4:14)
No, he didn't. No, no, no. Let's be clear.

**Tim Miller** (4:16)
It's not easy to save money.

**Ta-Nehisi Coates** (4:17)