An oral history of the Trump shock
By 
This (gift link; h/t commenter Shirley0401) looks like a really interesting oral history of the reaction of people in and around the Obama administration to Trump’s win in 2016.
Oral histories can be extremely useful, because they allow historians and others to compare the reactions and recollections of many different people to the same events. In this case, the most striking aspect of the project, based on the story’s description of it, is the extent to which denial about the possibility of Trump becoming president was still going very strong in November of 2016, five years after the White House Correspondents’ dinner, where understandably enough Obama and Seth Meyers treated the very idea as a ridiculous joke.
But nine years after he left office with high approval ratings and one year into Mr. Trump’s second term, what remains striking is how inconceivable it seemed to Mr. Obama and his team that populist disenchantment with the establishment, globalization and demographic changes would elevate a figure they scorned. It was a question that hovered over the interviews as they struggled for answers.
“The outcome of the election was a direct rebuke of everything that we had been trying to do for the last 10 years,” reflected Josh Earnest, who was Mr. Obama’s last White House press secretary.
“Trump’s candidacy,” he added, “the essence of his being and everything that he stood for and everything about the way that he carried himself and everything that he championed and his rhetoric, his campaign tactics — all were anathema to everything that the Obama campaign and the Obama era, the Obama administration, had been about.”
Obama is, both intellectually and in terms of temperament, a meliorist reformer, a fundamentally moderate man, who is in every way the opposite of the radical revolutionary who for some deeply mysterious reason he was assumed to be, by the people whose complete freakout about his election would prove to be the single most important factor in Trump’s election, and eventual re-election.
When confronted with the both comically absurd and fundamentally horrifying prospect of Donald Trump becoming president of the United States, every bone in Obama’s body inclined both him and those around him to respond, “we’re better than that.”