My tenure drove Republicans towards Trump, says Obama
PARANOIA and anxiety about a “black man in the White House” drove the Republican Party towards Donald Trump, Barack Obama has claimed in his new memoir.
Mr Obama, in his most scathing assessment of the outgoing president to date, claimed Mr Trump promised an “elixir for the racial anxiety” felt by millions of “spooked” Americans.
“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deepseated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted,” Mr Obama writes.
“Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president.”
Mr Obama frames the “obstructionism” of Republicans, which he says often left him hamstrung, as being rooted in their attempt to appeal to anxieties about the first black president. The muchanticipated 768-page memoir, titled A Promised Land and being published on Tuesday, chronicles the future president’s childhood and political rise, as well as his 2008 election victory and his two terms in office. It is thought that he deliberately waited until after the elec
tion to publish the book.
In it, he claims that Sarah Palin, former vice-presidential nominee and Tea Party member, first gave voice to these racial fears. “Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the [Republican Party] – xenophobia, anti intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks – were finding their way to centre stage.”
In a particularly timely reflection, he reveals the thought process behind picking Joe Biden, now president-elect, as his running mate.
“One of the reasons I’d chosen Joe to act as an intermediary – in addition to his Senate experience and legislative acumen – was my awareness that in [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] Mcconnell’s mind, negotiations with the vice president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperation with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do,” Mr Obama writes.
Writing on their famed “bromance”, Mr Obama said of Mr Biden: “What mattered most, though, was what my gut told me – that Joe was decent, honest, and loyal. I believed that he cared about ordinary people, and that when things got tough, I could trust him. I wouldn’t be disappointed.”