Former Republican Max Boot spent eight years trying to stop Obama as an aide to both John McCain and Mitt Romney, and as a longtime conservative columnist.
Boot, who is now a columnist for the Washington Post, was never a Trump fan, but he did write a column the day after the election in which he argued that a Trump presidency "might not be so bad" and encouraged optimism.
Now, in a new piece for the Post, Boot is prepared to say that, actually, it is that bad.
"Now I would take Obama back in a nanosecond," he writes. "His presidency appears to be a lost golden age when reason and morality reigned. All of his faults, real as they were, fade into insignificance compared with the crippling defects of his successor. And his strengths — seriousness, dignity, intellect, probity, dedication to ideals larger than self — shine all the more clearly in retrospect."
Boot even admits that he recently cried while watching an Obama speech.
"It can be depressing to think about our current predicament under a president whose loyalty to America is suspect but whose racism and xenophobia are undoubted," he writes. "However, Obama’s speech gave me a glimmer of optimism... we had a president with whom I could disagree without ever doubting his fitness to lead. We can have one again."