What Parts of Obama's Legacy Will Survive Trump?

On January 20, on the west front terrace of Capitol Hill, with Barack and Michelle Obama likely looking on from a few feet away, Donald J. Trump will place his left hand on the Bible and raise his right hand in the air, repeating the oath of office given by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to officially assume the role as the 45th president of the United States of America.

After that, what will happen is anyone's guess.

Trump has made many outlandish promises on his way to the presidency, and his aides have talked about a "First Day Project," modeled on Ronald Reagan's early time in office, where he signs executive orders that erases as much of Obama's accomplishments as he can. The cabinet appointees he's made—generals, billionaires, and Republican hardliners—have shown the extent to which he wants to remake the top tier of American government.

But Trump will have problems of his own. According to Gallup , he'll be the least popular present to take office in the last 20 years, while his predecessor, Obama, is one of the most popular outgoing presidents. He'll be walking a political tightrope, balancing the very different demands of his base, his cabinet, and Congressional Republicans. The consensus is that Trump will work to reverse Obama's legacy, but how he does that and what he replaces it with is an open question.

Like many presidents in their last days in office, Obama has obviously been thinking about what he's going to leave behind. In the run-up to the election, the president sat down with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin for Vanity Fair, and talked about posterity: "Sometimes I carry with me that perspective, which tells me that my particular worries on any given day—how I'm doing in the polls, or what somebody is saying about me… for good or for ill—isn't particularly relevant," he said. "What is relevant is: What am I building that lasts?"

To answer that question, I surveyed policy experts and journalists, and here's what they told me:

Since the election, Trump has continued to be extremely hazy with where he stands on climate change, saying recently that "nobody really knows" if it's real. In a span of days, he signaled he was ambiguous about the landmark Paris climate agreement—which he vowed to tear up on the campaign trail—and had Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore, two outspoken environmentalists, visit him and his daughter, Ivanka, at Trump Tower. Then he chose Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a fellow climate skeptic and opponent of environmental regulations, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

But just defanging the EPA won't erase what Obama has done when it comes to climate. Perhaps one of the Obama administration's longest-lasting legacies will be its focus— through both investments and executive orders—on renewable energy, which, in turn, has caused a seismic shift in where investors are now placing their money. According to experts quoted in the New York Times, a world in which solar and wind are just as competitive as coal and oil will make Trump's pledge to fully deliver on his promise to preserve mining jobs not only economically difficult, but almost impossible.

That said, what Trump can do is expand upon the parts of Obama's energy legacy that frustrated liberals. "I think that Trump will try to outdo Obama on the fossil fuel front," Bill McKibben, the famed environmental journalist and activist, told me over email, "which won't be easy."

McKibben then reminded me of a speech Obama made in Oklahoma on the 2012 campaign trail. "America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years," Obama said, to much applause. He then dove into specifics, proudly: "Over the last three years, I've directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We're opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We've quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We've added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some."

In that vein, Trump could try to open up more lands and waters to drilling, McKibben said, and resume the long-lived (but recently suspended) Obama policy of coal leasing on federal lands. The $1 trillion infrastructure bill that Trump touts as a top priority could also follow the lead of Obama's stimulus package and include renewable energy projects. But McKibben wasn't holding his breath: "Not many would be my guess."

When I joked about whether Trump would continue one of Obama's biggest environmental achievements—protecting more tracts of lands than any other president under Teddy Roosevelt's Antiquities Act—if a golf course was involved, McKibben replied, blankly, "Why would that not surprise me?"

Foreign policy is one area where Trump could have an immediate, lasting, and potentially damaging impact. Rebecca Friedman Lissner was frank. "The worldview that Trump has articulated throughout the campaign and previously in his speaking and writing on foreign policy represents a fundamentally different strategic worldview, not only from President Obama," she told me, "but also every American president since the US emerged as the so-called 'leader of the free world' in World War II."

Lissner is an expert on presidential transitions—as a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, she specializes in the importance of intelligence briefings between the changing administrations; her latest article in The Atlantic discusses their history, and what could go terribly wrong. (The botched Bay of Pigs invasion being perhaps the greatest example of an operation botched partly thanks to a bad transition.)

On nearly every major foreign policy issue—Syria, China, the Iran deal, American exceptionalism; counterterrorism; Russia—Trump fundamentally disagrees with Obama, she noted. But the dose of Trumpian dissonance is what's tripping foreign policy spectators like herself up. "I think we'll see a far greater likelihood of profound foreign policy discontinuity in this transition than any other transition in memory," she said. "But the specifics of where those divergences will occur are going to be difficult to predict."

In other words, the Trump Doctrine has yet to be written. But if his appointments to Secretary of Defense (former Marine General James Mattis), national security adviser (retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn), and Homeland Security (retired Marine General John Kelly) are any indication, the "Bush 2.0" tactics that critics on the left assailed Obama for—the drone strikes, the covert ops, the foreign surveillance—will likely continue.

"Where you do see continuity is with these military officers who Trump is appointing to his cabinet who did serve under the Obama administration, and will provide a sort of administrative continuity," Lissner told me. "I think when it comes to tactical use of force and less political decisions, you'll probably see a good deal of similarity."

But even so, Lissner quickly pointed out, a worldview that is vastly different from anything we've seen since 1945 can drastically change how, and to what extent, America uses those tactics abroad. She referred to two dueling speeches that Obama and Trump gave on foreign policy on the same day, in early December, as a striking display of difference in how they perceive American force—a cautious yet moral policeman of the world, versus a geopolitical game of winners and losers. "For something like drone warfare, it's just a tactic; it's not strategy," she explained. "The guiding principle that it's used for can lead to totally different outcomes."

When I asked Jenny Pizer, the director of law and policy at Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest civil rights defense organization for the LGBTQ community, what Obama's longest living legacy would be on the issue, she said it's tonal.

"The change in the legal and political world of LGBT rights transformed profoundly in the Obama years," she told me. "And the president deserves very significant credit for this, as well as his family, the Vice President, and the VP's wife. The change in tone, and this expression of inclusion, were key drivers for the LGBT community and those who are HIV positive."

"I anticipate," she continued, "that this change in atmosphere will be one of the most important, and why rules and regulations will stay in place."

It may have been this evolution in tone from the White House, in the form of amicus curiae briefs, that led the Supreme Court to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act and same-sex marriage bans nationwide. There were also a number bureaucratic gestures that the Obama team have made, like the administrative guidance the departments of Justice and Education gave in May, stating that Title IX protections, which ban sex discrimination in any federally funded education program, should guarantee a transgender individual's access to a bathroom in a Virginia school. Or the Department of Labor's final orders for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which bans workplace discrimination against LGBTQ individuals and prohibits federal contractors from discriminating against employees based on sexual orientation or gender identity. In general, most federal agencies under Obama have expanded their anti-discrimination laws to protect LGBTQ rights.

These were changes that the Bush White House seemed reluctant to make, Pizer said, but Obama embraced. "The Obama administration really was the catalyst, and the spotlight," she added. "It changed the process and consciousness, publicizing complaints that were, for many people, huge issues."

Several of these orders have had their day in federal court—the school bathroom rules for transgender students will be taken up by the Supreme Court in coming months—and Pizer believes that, should they be upheld, it'll be awfully hard to reverse them, due to growing public support for LGBTQ rights, both in America and abroad. "It's hard to go back, and reinstate that mood of discrimination," she told me.

This sort of "moral arc of history" argument, Pizer said, also applies to the military, with Congress's repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell in 2010 and the Pentagon's end of the transgender ban in June, as well as the federal hate crime bill of 2009 that now offers protection to the LGBTQ community. "I've heard from across the spectrum that it would be complicated to reverse these policies now," she said. "With the military, younger service members do not see a problem, and have embraced the changes."

The biggest threats to these policies, Pizer thinks, is not Trump himself—who seems pretty nonchalant about this issue—but the people he puts into power, like Vice President Mike Pence ("He really seems like he wants to reverse time and make LGBT disappear") and attorney general nominee Senator Jeff Sessions ("His focus on civil rights enforcement will be on behalf of self-identified Christians, and their religious liberties").

Under George W. Bush, she said, the country had "religious ideologues in charge of federal agencies," which meant there was some opposition to LGBTQ rights. But in terms of Trump, she continued, "It's really how much he moderates to people with extreme views, and that remains to be seen."

The big questions about what Trump will do in office center around Obama's greatest legacy items, like the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. Jonathan Alter, who has written two books on Obama and has spent hours with him since 2002, said it will come down to numbers.

"The only real check on his power are public opinion surveys," Alter argued. "Because demagogues are focused on public opinion and people's basic instincts, but whatever they do in demagoguing an issue, the end result is to win support."

Take for example, he said, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)—Senator Elizabeth Warren's brainchild, created to protect folks from getting ripped off by the predatory practices of some businesses. "If Trump concludes that the banks that want CFPB killed are less important to him, politically, than the consumers who are protected," Alter said, "then he's not ideological enough to side necessarily with the banks."

The policy tug-of-war has left a big question mark over the fate of Obamacare. Republicans have long promised to repeal it the first chance they got, but certain aspects of it—like requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions, and letting people in their early 20s stay on their parents' plans—are popular, and a blanket repeal would likely disrupt the entire healthcare market. (Pizer also argued that Section 1557 of the ACA, which bans sex discrimination in the federally funded exchanges, cannot be removed without affecting thousands, if not millions, of LGBT individuals who rely on them.)

Trump, though, doesn't seem to be strongly ideological when it comes to healthcare policy. That malleability, Alter argued, may explain why Obama has kept quiet in the days since the election. "Obama can go and relay a 'legacy damage control' posture in exchange for holding his tongue," he told me. "All that Trump cares about is if you criticize him. Holding your tongue is a pretty small price to pay for saving big chunks of his legacy."

In that sense, Alter said it was strategic for Obama to reportedly have an open line of communication with the president-elect. After their first meeting in the Oval Office two days after the election, Trump praised the president, and signaled that he's taking his advice highly. "I told him I will look at his suggestions, and out of respect, I will do that," he told the Wall Street Journal.

Of course, whether he sticks to his word remains to be seen. Trump changed his positions on various topics many times over the course of the campaign, and a lot will depend on his day-to-day and month-to-month shifts in attitude and temper.

"That's the biggest threat to the Obama legacy," Alter told me. "In order to try to stay on good terms with him so that he listens to you, and not going too far in gutting Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. But also, [reminding him] that there's no [popular] mandate, which pisses him off."

"How do you do both at the same time?" he asked.

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