A16 N THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALMONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
anger at his successor with an instinct to
refrain from a brawl that he fears may
dent his popularity and challenge his
place in history.
That calculus, though, may be chang-
ing in the wake of George Floyd’s killing
by the police in Minneapolis. As Ameri-
ca’s first black president, now its first
black ex-president, Mr. Obama sees the
current social and racial awakening as
an opportunity to elevate a 2020 election
dictated by Mr. Trump’s mud-wrestling
style into something more meaningful —
to channel a new, youthful movement to-
ward a political aim, as he did in 2008.
He is doing so very carefully, charac-
teristically intent on keeping his cool, his
reputation, his political capital and his
dreams of a cosseted retirement intact.
“I don’t think he is hesitant. I think he
is strategic,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a top ad-
viser for over a decade. “He has always
been strategic about using his voice; it’s
his most valuable commodity.”
Mr. Obama is also mindful of a caution-
ary example: Bill Clinton’s attacks
against him in 2008 backfired so badly
that his wife’s campaign staff had to scale
back his appearances.
Many supporters have been pressing
him to be more aggressive.
“It would be nice, for a change, if
Barack Obama could emerge from his
cave and offer — no wait, DEMAND — a
way forward,” the columnist Drew Mag-
ary wrote in a much-shared Medium
post in April titled “Where the Hell is
Barack Obama?”
The counterargument: He did his job
and deserves to be left alone.
“Obama has now been out of office for
three and a half years, and he is still fac-
ing this kind of scrutiny — no one is pres-
suring white ex-presidents like George
W. Bush and Jimmy Carter the same
way,” said Monique Judge, news editor of
the online magazine The Root and author
of a 2018 article arguing that Mr. Obama
no longer owed the country a thing.
Mr. Obama’s head appears to be some-
where in the middle. He is not planning to
scrap his summer Vineyard vacation and
is still anguishing over the publication
date of his long-awaited memoir. But last
week he stepped up his nominally indi-
rect criticism of Mr. Trump’s administra-
tion — decrying a “shambolic, disorga-
nized, meanspirited approach to govern-
ance” during an online Biden fund-raiser.
And he made a pledge of sorts, telling Mr.
Biden’s supporters: “Whatever you’ve
done so far is not enough. And I hold my-
self and Michelle and our kids to that
same standard.”
Days later, during an invitation-only
Zoom fund-raiser, Mr. Obama expressed
outrage at the president’s use of “kung
flu” and “China virus” to describe the co-
ronavirus. “I don’t want a country in
which the president of the United States
is actively trying to promote anti-Asian
sentiment and thinks it’s funny. I don’t
want that. That still shocks and pisses
me off,” Mr. Obama said, according to a
transcript of his remarks provided by a
participant in the event.
Mr. Obama speaks with the former
vice president and top campaign aides
frequently, offering suggestions on
staffing and messaging. Last month, he
bluntly counseled Mr. Biden to keep his
speeches brief, interviews crisp andslash the length of his tweets, the better
to make the campaign a referendum on
Mr. Trump and the economy, according
to Democratic officials.
He has taken a particular interest in
Mr. Biden’s work-in-progress digital op-
eration, the officials said, enlisting pow-
erful friends, like the LinkedIn founder
Reid Hoffman and the former Google
chief executive Eric Schmidt, to share
their expertise, they said.
Yet he continues to slow-walk some re-
quests, especially to headline more fund-
raisers. Some in Mr. Obama’s camp sug-
gest he wants to avoid overshadowing
the candidate — which Mr. Biden’s peo-
ple aren’t buying.
“By all means, overshadow us,” one of
them joked.‘Set a Counterexample’From the moment Mr. Trump was
elected, Mr. Obama adopted a minimalist
approach: He would critique his policy
choices, not the man himself, following
the norm of civility observed by his pred-
ecessors, especially George W. Bush.
But norms are not Mr. Trump’s thing.
He made it clear from the start that he
wanted to eradicate any trace of Mr. Oba-
ma’s presence from the West Wing. “He
had the worst taste,” Mr. Trump told a
visitor in early 2017, showing off his new
curtains — which were not terribly dif-
ferent from Mr. Obama’s, in the view of
other people who tramped in and out of
the office during that chaotic period.
The cancellation was more pro-
nounced when it came to policy. One for-
mer White House official recalled Mr.
Trump interrupting an early presenta-
tion to make sure one staff proposal was
not “an Obama thing.”
During the transition, in what looks in
hindsight like a preview of the presiden-
cy, one Trump aide got the idea of print-
ing out the detailed checklist of Mr. Oba-
ma’s campaign promises from the official
White House website to repurpose as a
kind of hit list, according to two people
familiar with the effort.
“This is personal for Trump; it is all
about President Obama and demolishing
his legacy. It’s his obsession,” said
Omarosa Manigault Newman, an “Ap-
prentice” veteran and, until her abrupt
departure, one of the few black officials
in Mr. Trump’s West Wing. “President
Obama will not be able to rest as long as
Trump is breathing.”
When the two men met for a stilted
postelection sit-down in November 2016,
the president-elect was polite, so Mr.
Obama took the opportunity to advise
him against going scorched-earth on
Obamacare. “Look, you can take my
name off of it; I don’t care,” he said, ac-
cording to aides.
Mr. Trump nodded noncommittally.
As the transition dragged on, Mr.
Obama became increasingly uneasy at
what he saw as the breezy indifference of
the new president and his inexperienced
team. Many of them ignored the briefing
binders his staff had painstakingly
produced at his direction, former Obama
aides recalled, and instead of focusing on
policy or the workings of the West Wing,
they inquired about the quality of tacos
in the basement mess or where to find a
good apartment.
As for Mr. Trump, he had “no idea what
he’s doing,” Mr. Obama told an aide after
their Oval Office encounter.Election
Clifford Wagner, an 80-year-old
Republican in Tucson, Ariz., never
cared for President Trump.
He supported Jeb Bush in the
2016 presidential primary and cast
a protest vote in the general elec-
tion for Gary Johnson, the Liber-
tarian nominee. An Air Force vet-
eran, Mr. Wagner described
Trump’s presidency as a mortify-
ing experience: His friends in Eu-
rope and Japan tell him the U.S. is
“the laughingstock of the world.”
This year, Mr. Wagner said he
would register his opposition to Mr.
Trump more emphatically than he
did in 2016. He plans to vote for Jo-
seph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive
Democratic nominee, and hopes
the election is a ruinous one for the
Republican Party.
“I’m a Christian, and I do not be-
lieve in the hateful, racist, bigoted
speech that the president uses,” Mr.
Wagner said, adding, “I never
thought I’d say this: I hope we get a
Democratic president, a Democrat-
ic-controlled Senate and maintain a
Democratic-controlled House.”
Mr. Wagner is part of one of the
most important maverick voting
groups in the 2020 general elec-
tion: conservative-leaning seniors
who have soured on the Republican
Party over the past four years.
Republican candidates typically
carry older voters by solid mar-
gins, and in his first campaign Mr.
Trump bested Hillary Clinton by
seven percentage points with vot-
ers over 65. He won white seniors
by nearly triple that margin.
Today, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden
are tied among seniors, according
to a poll of registered voters con-
ducted by The New York Times and
Siena College. In six battleground
states, Mr. Biden has established a
clear upper hand, leading Mr.
Trump by six percentage points
among the oldest voters and nearly
matching the president’s support
among whites in that age group.
That is no small advantage for
Mr. Biden, the former vice presi-
dent, given the prevalence of re-
tirement communities in a few of
those crucial states, including Ari-
zona and Florida.
No Democrat has won or broken
even with seniors in two decades,
since Al Gore in 2000 devoted much
of his campaign to warning that Re-
publicans would cut popular pro-
grams like Social Security and
Medicare. In 2016, Mr. Trump, now
74, seemed in some ways keenly at-
tuned to the political sensitivities of
voters in his own age group. He
bluntly rejected his party’s long-
standing interest in restructuring
government guarantees of retire-
ment security.
But Mr. Trump’s presidency has
been a trying experience for many
of these voters, some of whom are
so frustrated and disillusioned that
they are preparing to take the dras-
tic step of supporting a Democrat.
The grievances of these defect-
ing seniors are familiar, most or all
of them shared by their younger
peers. But these voters often ex-
press themselves with a sharp dis-
may and disappointment. They see
Mr. Trump as coarse and disre-
spectful, divisive to his core and
failing to comport himself with the
dignity of the other presidents that
they have observed. The Times poll
also found that most seniors disap-
proved of Mr. Trump’s handling of
race relations and the protests af-
ter the death of George Floyd.
And as the coronavirus pan-
demic continues to sweep the coun-
try, putting older Americans at par-
ticular risk, these voters feel a spe-
cial kind of frustration and betrayal
with Mr. Trump’s ineffective lead-
ership and often-blasé public com-
ments about the crisis.
The president has urged the
country to return to life-as-usual
far more quickly than the top pub-
lic-health officials in his own ad-
ministration have recommended.
Some prominent Republican offi-
cials and conservative pundits
have even suggested at times that
older people should be willing to
risk their own health for the sake of
a quicker resumption of the busi-
ness cycle.
In The Times poll, seniors in the
battleground states disapproved of
Mr. Trump’s handling of the coro-
navirus pandemic by seven points,
52 percent to 45 percent. By a 26-
point margin, this group said the
federal government should pri-
oritize containing the pandemic
over reopening the economy.
Former Representative Carlos
Curbelo of Florida, a 40-year-old
Republican deeply versed in the
politics of the retiree-rich swing
state, said many seniors were dis-
turbed by important aspects of Mr.
Trump’s record and found Mr. Bi-
den a mild and respectable alterna-
tive who did not inspire the same
antipathy on the right that Mrs.
Clinton did in 2016.
Regarded by much of his own
party as bland and conventional,
Mr. Biden’s nostalgia-cloaked can-
didacy may be uniquely equipped
to ease a sizable group of right-of-
center seniors into the Democratic
column, at least for one election.
“He’s not ever been known to be
a radical or an extreme leftist or lib-
eral, so there is certainly a degree
of comfort there,” Mr. Curbelo said.
He added: “This public health cri-
sis is so threatening, especially toseniors, and because the president
hasn’t earned high marks in his
handling of it, that has been a factor
in Biden’s improving numbers.”
Mr. Biden and his allies have ex-
pressed excitement about the pos-
sibilities that the shifting senior
vote could create in the fall. That is
true not only in Sun Belt retirement
havens but also in Midwestern
states where Mr. Biden is currently
running well ahead of Mrs. Clin-
ton’s 2016 performance with a
range of conservative-leaning con-
stituencies, including older whites.
In Iowa, former Gov. Tom Vil-
sack, a close Biden ally, said the for-
mer vice president had closed a
substantial deficit in the state
through his coronavirus response,
his connection with older rural vot-
ers and his ability to empathize.
“Part of it is the demeanor he has
projected during the course of this
pandemic,” Mr. Vilsack said, before
acknowledging, “As much as Joe’s
doing, it’s probably as much or
more what the president has done
or failed to do.”
He cited an ad from a group of
anti-Trump Republicans that cast
Mr. Trump’s approach to crisis as
erratic and selfish, unlike past
presidents who confronted trage-
dies like the Challenger disaster
and the Oklahoma City bombing.
“Each of those presidents was
able to connect emotionally to the
feelings of the nation,” Mr. Vilsack
said. “This president has had a re-
ally, really hard time doing that.”
Mr. Trump’s ineffective response
to the coronavirus weighed on the
thinking of many older voters sur-
veyed in the poll, including Patrick
Mallon, 73, a retired information
technology specialist in Battle
Creek, Mich.
Mr. Mallon said he was a regis-
tered Republican who had long
been unhappy with Mr. Trump but
mindful that he was presiding over
a strong economy. The pandemic
set Mr. Mallon firmly against Mr.
Trump’s re-election.
“The main reason is Donald
Trump saying, ‘Don’t wear a mask,
this thing is going to go away, we
can have large gatherings,’ ” he
said. “Everything he says is incor-
rect and dangerous to the country.”
When young people contract the
coronavirus, Mr. Mallon added,
“most of them will survive, but
they’re going to give it to their par-ents, their grandparents — and I’m
sorry, we’re just as important as
that younger generation is.”
The abandonment of Mr. Trump
by older voters is far from univer-
sal, and he still has a strong base
among older white men and self-
described conservatives. Nation-
ally, the oldest voters approve of
Mr. Trump’s handling of the econ-
omy by 12 points, more than double
the figure for voters of all ages.
And in the battleground states,
Mr. Trump has a 10-point lead over
Mr. Biden with white men over the
age of 65, even as Mr. Biden has
opened up an advantage with white
women in the same age group.
Nonwhite seniors in the battle-
ground states support Mr. Biden
over Mr. Trump by a huge margin,
65 percent to 25 percent.
Even among some seniors sup-
portive of Mr. Trump, however,
there is an undercurrent of unease
about the way he approaches the
presidency.
Karen Gamble, 65, of Reidsville,
N.C., said that she was dissatisfied
with the overall government re-
sponse to the coronavirus outbreak
and echoed many popular com-
plaints about Mr. Trump’s persona.
She said she wished, for instance,
that Mr. Trump “wouldn’t be such a
bully and would conform to being
in a regal-like position, as our presi-
dents have always been.”
Ms. Gamble said she was plan-
ning to support Mr. Trump all the
same, describing Mr. Biden as too
old and too compromised on mat-
ters related to China. But Ms. Gam-
ble, who said she has a “severe lung
problem,” expressed hope that Mr.
Trump would change his approach
to the pandemic.
“We can’t blame him for this —
how many presidents could do any
better than what he’s done?” Ms.
Gamble said, before adding: “I just
wish he wouldn’t let the country
open up as much as it has. I see all
these teens and young people at
the beach, and I fear for them be-
cause now they’re getting sick.”
In Tucson, Gerald Lankin, a
more forceful Trump supporter,
said he would vote “against the
Democrats.” Mr. Lankin, 77, said he
found Mr. Trump’s personal man-
ner offensive but agreed with him
on most issues and saw Democrats
as “much, much, much, much too
far to the left.”
“He hasn’t really done anything
that I can say I’m against,” Mr.
Lankin said of Mr. Trump. “I think
what he’s doing is the best he can.
But, boy, he is tough to take. He is a
tough guy to take.”
There may be time for Mr. Trump
to regain his footing with seniors,
along with several other right-lean-
ing groups that have drifted away.
His ability to do so could have far-
reaching implications not just for
his chances of winning a second
term, but also his party’s ability to
keep its hold on the Senate.
At the moment, Mr. Trump’s un-
popularity with older voters ap-
pears to be hindering other Repub-
licans in states including Arizona
and Michigan.
Gayle Craven, 80, of High Point,
N.C., a registered Republican, said
she had not voted for Mr. Trump in
2016 and would reject him again
this year. She said she saw Mr. Bi-
den as an “honest man.”
“Trump is the biggest disap-
pointment,” she said. “He has made
America look like idiots. I think he’s
an embarrassment to my country.”
Other older voters leaning to-
ward Mr. Biden cautioned that they
could still change their minds, like
Frederick Monk, 73, of Mesa, Ariz.,
who said he had voted for Mr.
Trump but quickly came to see him
as “incompetent.”
Still, Mr. Monk said his mind was
not fully made up. If Mr. Biden
chooses an overly liberal running
mate, he said he could cast a vote
for Mr. Trump and hope his second
term is an exercise in futility.
“Hopefully the Democrats re-
take the Senate and make his next
four years miserable, if he lasts
that long,” Mr. Monk said.Trump supporters listened to the president at an event at The Villages in Florida in October 2019.
ANNA MONEYMAKER/THE NEW YORK TIMESMany Older White Voters
Reject the Trump Playbook
By ALEXANDER BURNS
and KATIE GLUECKFeeling frustration
and betrayal with the
ineffective leadership.
Obama Re-enters
Political Battlefield
He Wanted to Quit
From Page A