Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday November 11, 2016
Obama’s legacy is on the line with Trump’s win
President Obama urged the country to unify Wednesday and pledged to work with President-elect Donald Trump, a candidate who for months he blasted as unfit to lead the country and who will now be succeeding him in office.
“It is no secret that the president-elect and I have had some pretty significant differences,” Obama said of Trump in a Rose Garden address. “One thing you realize in this job is that the presidency and the vice presidency is bigger than any of us.”
Obama likened the presidency to a relay race, telling the hundreds of exhausted and emotionally shaken White House staffers who packed the Rose Garden that they were leaving the country in a better position than it was eight years ago.
But for Obama, the election of Trump and the Republicans’ control of Congress puts at risk many of his signature policies over the past eight years. At the core of Trump’s campaign was a promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act and to scrap Obama’s executive actions on immigration and climate change. Trump also has promised to undo the president’s deal to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, the biggest foreign policy achievement of Obama’s second term.
Many of the changes to Obama’s signature programs could happen quickly. Trump has vowed to pull out of the Paris Agreement to curb greenhouse gases and has promised to cancel an Environmental Protection Agency power-plant rule that is intended to cut emissions by about 30 percent over the next nine years, compared with 2005 levels.
On immigration, Trump vowed to overturn Obama’s executive actions to grant work permits to millions of undocumented immigrants, including more than 700,000 younger immigrants already benefiting from the program. A Trump administration could also drop the government’s defense of legal challenges to his executive actions on immigration.
Obama’s push to persuade Congress to ratify the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive trade deal that Trump savaged on the campaign trail, now looks dead. Trump has vowed to renegotiate other existing deals that are already in place. (Continued: Washington Post)