Donald Trump's election has completely eradicated President Barack Obama's legacy, which was dependent on Hillary Clinton winning the White House, conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer said.
"Obama's legacy is toast; it's gone," Krauthammer said Thursday on Fox News Channel's "The Kelly File."
Obama campaigned "desperately" against Trump, he said, because "he knew that so much of his accomplishments had been built on ramming stuff through the House and the Senate with very little consensus – in fact none on Obamacare coming from the Republicans – on executive orders that are reversible with the stroke of a pen."
Trump has vowed to use his own pen to reverse any of Obama's executive orders he deems to be illegal.
Obama came into office eight years ago expecting to be the left's Ronald Reagan, Krauthammer said.
"Reagan came in, he changed the ideological trajectory of the country, turned it into a conservative country where that was the underlying consensus," he said. "Obama thought he was going to change all of that and begin a liberal path. It did not turn out that way. The country rejected his policies."
The idea Obama would be the beginner of a new "liberal ascendancy" is now dead, and Obama realizes it as much as anyone else, Krauthammer said.
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