The most exuberant farewell event—a dance party at the White House—took place on January 6th. It was a freezing night, and people shivered outside as they waited to get past security. There were campaign donors and loyal staffers in the crowd, but also a starry list of entertainment executives, musicians, actors, and athletes: Barry Diller, Oprah Winfrey, John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, Paul McCartney, George Clooney, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Magic Johnson. Questlove was the music director. Stevie Wonder and Solange performed. The Electric Slide was danced, with Michelle Obama very much in the lead. As dawn approached, chicken and waffles were served.
“There was laughing, there was loving, there was hugs,” Chance the Rapper said in a video he posted at 4:33 A.M. “It was historic, it was Black, it was beautiful.” And yet there were distinctly mixed emotions at the party, and it was no mystery why: the first Black President was being replaced by someone who had expressed little but scorn for him. Janelle Monáe, leaving the dance floor in a lather of sweat, told someone why she had kept at it for so long. “That’s easy,” she said. “No way I’m getting invited back to this house anytime soon.”
Years later, Sharon Malone, a Washington doctor and the wife of the former Attorney General Eric Holder, said, about that night, “You realized that an era was coming to an end, and it was the last moment of joy we were going to have in that White House.” She added, “We were making the best of a bad situation.”
Cartoon by Liana Finck
Ten days before Trump moved in, Obama flew to Chicago, where he had launched his political career, to deliver a speech that laid out his case for why the country was where it was. Rising economic inequality had sparked the cynicism and polarization that lifted Trump into office, he said. He called on different ethnic and racial groups to listen to one another from a position of trust, and to build a new social contract. “We all have to try harder,” he said. “We all have to start with the premise that each of our fellow-citizens loves this country just as much as we do.” He finished with a promise about the battles ahead: “I will be right there with you, as a citizen, for all of my remaining days.”
A few weeks ago, I spoke to Obama about how he’s spent the past decade—and whether events have shaken the confidence that he expressed in that farewell speech. “I would be dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge that,” he replied. How Obama has used his time—including since Trump returned to office—says much about how he sees his role, its potential and its limits.
On January 20, 2017, as Donald Trump was being sworn in as the forty-fifth President, the Obamas sat on the reviewing stand. Michelle noted the predominantly white and male faces around them. At some point, she stopped even trying to smile. “There was no color on that stage,” she said later. “There was no reflection of the broader sense of America.”
After the new President delivered his “American carnage” speech—a dark address that led George W. Bush to note, “That was some weird shit”—the Obamas flew by helicopter to Joint Base Andrews, where they boarded a plane that took them to Palm Springs for a vacation. On the flight, Michelle sobbed uncontrollably for a half hour. “It was just the release of eight years of trying to do everything perfectly,” she said in an onstage interview with Winfrey in 2018. “I said to Barack, ‘That was so hard. What we just did was so hard, and I’ve wanted to say that for eight years.’ ” No small part of the pressure they felt was the threat of violence. According to the Washington Post, the Secret Service assessed that the Obamas had faced three times as many threats as previous First Families. One night in 2011, a gunman fired seven shots that hit the White House; one struck ballistic glass on the Truman Balcony, where the Obamas often sat.
