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| George W Bush (off camera) makes Barack Obama laugh. Jimmy Carter enjoys the moment. |
Over on the BBC World Service, James Naughtie has been giving his valedictory assessment of President Barack Obama. He's also been airing his suspicions about Trump supporters. Here's how his piece ended:
The Obama Effect will last. His presidency wasn't an aberration but a break with America's past.
For that reason it disturbed many people. Those who ran with Trump, driven by hatred of all that liberals believed or are said to have done, are the evidence for that. They want done with a distant establishment which, weirdly, a young black man from Chicago, had come to represent. And who's to say that lurking underneath wasn't the old demon of race, asking Americans 'Is this really the kind of man who should be in the White House?'
Time will pass before we settle on the first assessment of the Obama years but what we can say now is that for many Americans there was a bright, shining moment. Like Kennedy and Reagan in their different ways he made the landscape seem new and painted it in different colours - an achievement that would make many other ex-presidents satisfied and proud.
