(ThyBlackMan.com) On the nineteenth of June, on Juneteenth of all days, the doors of the Obama Presidential Center swung open to the public in Jackson Park on the South Side of Chicago. Eight stories. Nineteen acres. A library branch, a basketball court, gardens and a great lawn. Eight hundred and fifty million dollars in construction funded through private donations, though taxpayers also covered substantial infrastructure improvements in and around Jackson Park. Barack and Michelle Obama stood there and shook hands with the first folks through the door, then sat down and read to a room full of children.
Now I have watched a good many presidents come and go. Some I admired. Some I could barely stomach. A few I simply outlasted. You reach a certain age and you stop keeping score by party. You start measuring a man by what he leaves standing after the movers come for his boxes.
So consider what the sitting president of the United States did as that building’s opening approached. No invitation came his way, which surprised nobody. The reply arrived anyway, a picture cooked up by a machine showing the center with a giant garbage bag sitting on its roof.
There it is. The whole decade in one image. A man raises a building. Another man draws a cartoon of trash on it.
I am not here to canonize the 44th president. He made his share of choices I would argue with over a long dinner. But I lived long enough to see a Black family walk into that big white house not as the help but as the first family, and I will not pretend that meant nothing to a man like me. It meant a great deal. And it seems to have meant a great deal to Mr. Trump too, though for reasons pointed in the opposite direction.
Think about where his modern political rise truly gathered force. Not with a plan for the country. It gathered force through a lie about a birth certificate. Before the rallies, before the red hats, there was a wealthy fellow on television insisting the sitting president did not belong, was not truly one of us, had slipped into the highest office through a side door. That was the launchpad. Everything after got poured on top of that original suspicion.
Look at where we sit in the summer of 2026. This past February the White House announced the full revocation of the endangerment finding, the 2009 determination that gave the government its footing on greenhouse gases, and billed it as the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the republic. Read the celebration statements. Count how many times a certain name appears. The finding was not simply wrong in their telling. It was his. That was the selling point.
Then came the plan released just days ago. More than seven hundred rules lined up for the chopping block, with a trillion and a half dollars in projected savings claimed by the administration, a good portion aimed backward at what one predecessor wrote and what the next one wrote after him.
I want to be fair, because fairness is the only thing that earns a writer the right to be believed. A president is allowed to disagree with the man before him. That is ordinary. Reagan undid Carter. Obama walked back plenty of Bush. Reversal is part of the job, and the president’s people will tell you, with some justice, that he has done more than knock things over. There is the big tax and spending law. There is the Laken Riley Act. There are the judges. There is a hard turn at the southern border. There is the Gaza ceasefire he helped push across the line in the fall of 2025, which surprised a number of doubters, myself among them.
So no, the ledger is not empty. I grant the man his entries. But sit with the shape of it, and notice how many of even those wins get sold as corrections. Again and again the pitch is not, here is what I am creating for you. The pitch is, here is what I am erasing. And a man who defines himself by the erasing has quietly handed somebody else the pen.
It has traveled well past policy now, and this is where my stomach turns. Last summer the president stood in the Oval Office and accused his predecessor of treason. Not corruption. Not bad judgment. Treason, a word that in this country still carries the shadow of a rope. It came out flat, the former president named as ringleader, without public evidence presented to substantiate the charge. The response from Chicago called it what it looked like, a weak attempt at distraction. Then Trump reposted a fabricated video of the man being handcuffed.
This past February, a video depicting the former president and his wife as apes appeared on Trump’s Truth Social account. The White House blamed a staff member, but the image had already gone out beneath the name of the president of the United States. I am an old man. I know exactly what that picture is. My grandmother knew what it was. There is no cleverness in it and no politics in it. It is the oldest insult this country ever manufactured, passed along like a joke among friends.
Joe Biden gets his own version of the treatment. The autopen business has swallowed enormous energy, the claim that the signature was mechanical and the mind was gone and the orders were therefore hollow. Trump said last fall he was canceling executive actions signed that way. The House ran its investigation and produced its report. Then federal prosecutors looked hard at the thing and walked away without a viable crime to charge. Biden answered plainly enough, saying he made the decisions during his presidency. Yet in May the president was still posting cartoons of a sleeping Biden with Obama standing over him holding the autopen box.
Meanwhile the country he actually governs has its troubles. Prices have not behaved. Consumer sentiment hit a record low this spring. His approval has fallen into the mid thirties, matching the lowest levels of his second term and approaching the worst numbers of his first. And when the numbers sour, the reflex is not to reach for a fresh idea. The reflex is to reach for the old enemy.
That is the part that ought to trouble even his admirers. When your identity gets stitched so tightly to opposing one man, you have handed him a strange authority over you. You have made him your compass. The man is out of office, writing his books, raising his daughters into grown women, and still that name floats up at the podium, still the ghost the crowd gets asked to boo. A free man does not keep returning to the cell he swears he escaped from.
I have known this type in ordinary life, not only in politics. The fellow who cannot stop talking about the brother with the bigger house. The uncle still fighting an argument from a Thanksgiving twenty years gone. There is a hunger in that habit that never fills, because what they are truly after is not victory over the other person. It is the quieting of something inside themselves, and no amount of knocking down another man’s work will ever hush that particular noise.
Here is what my years have taught me about legacy, and I use the word carefully because it gets tossed around too cheap these days. You do not earn a good name by proving somebody else deserved a worse one. You earn it by building. A school. A road. A law. A place where a grandfather from Texas can bring his granddaughters and show them what he witnessed with his own eyes. Roosevelt built. Johnson, for all his sins, gave us the civil rights and voting rights laws that reached down and changed my own life in ways I can still feel in my hands.
So what has Mr. Trump raised that will still be standing, still throwing shade, when the noise finally dies down? That is not a rhetorical trap. It is an honest question, and I would welcome one of his people across the table to answer it without once reaching for the name of a predecessor. I suspect they would struggle. And I suspect the struggle tells the story better than I ever could.
There is a real sadness in it, once you let yourself feel the thing. Here was a man handed enormous power twice. The podium, the pen, the party, all of it in his grip. Any road was open to him, including the one where you get remembered for something entirely your own. The grudge won out. So did the wrecking crew, swinging away at another man’s house instead of laying the first brick of your own.
The final verdict is not written, and I am old enough to know better than to pretend otherwise. History has a way of embarrassing men who were dead certain they had it figured. Maybe something he set in motion will grow into a thing worth remembering on its own terms.
But I would not lay my money there. Because the picture I cannot shake is from that Friday in Jackson Park. A building full of light and children on one side of the country. On the other, a man alone with a screen, drawing garbage onto somebody else’s roof.
A shadow is not a legacy. And a man who spends his one life fighting one has told you, without meaning to, exactly whose light he has been standing in the whole time.
Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna
Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.
One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.
