Find the autocrat

David Remnick begins his latest interminable bloviation in the high-brow New Yorker with the following paragraph:

The morning after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Barack Obama summoned staff members to the Oval Office. Some were fairly junior and had never been in the room before. They were sombre, hollowed out, some fighting tears, humiliated by the defeat, fearful of autocracy’s moving vans pulling up to the door.

The definition of autocracy is "a system of government by one person with absolute power." Considering that in the last 4 years, Obama has attempted to rule with "the pen and the phone" through unilateral executive orders and international agreements not submitted to the Senate for approval as treaties, I think the term "autocrat" is much better applied to him, than to Donald Trump.