‘Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House’ elevated Trump, Obama book says

BY CHACOUR KOOP
NOVEMBER 12, 2020

Former President Barack Obama speaks at a rally as he campaigns for Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden, Monday, Nov. 2, 2020, in Miami. Obama will release a memoir on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky) LYNNE SLADKY AP

Barack Obama’s highly anticipated memoir says President Donald Trump seized on fears of a Black man in the White House to succeed politically, reports say.

The former president’s latest memoir “A Promised Land” will be released next week, a 768-page book spanning Obama’s “political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency — a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil,” according to publisher Penguin Random House. It will be the first in a volume of presidential memoirs to be published by Obama.

Though Obama’s book ends after his first term, it includes references to his successor and the false “birtherism” conspiracy theory Trump seized upon, according to an excerpt obtained by CNN.

“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted,” Obama wrote, according to CNN. “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. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”

The memoir ends as Obama watches the raid to kill Osama bin Laden, NPR reported. It was in the hours before this operation that Obama served up jokes at Trump’s expense at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, mocking the ”birther” conspiracy to the laughter of many in the room except the would-be president.

As NPR editor and correspondent Ron Elving points out, the book is more than “Obama’s answer to four years of Trump’s rhetorical assaults and policy reversals.”

A review in The New York Timesdescribes the memoir as ”nearly always pleasurable to read, sentence by sentence, the prose gorgeous in places” as Obama describes his career — from early campaigns to the SEAL team raid. Though focused on politics, the book also includes personal stories about his daughters and wife, Michelle Obama, according to The New York Times.

“The story will continue in the second volume, but Barack Obama has already illuminated a pivotal moment in American history, and how America changed while also remaining unchanged,” author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in the New York Times review.

The book will be released Nov. 17.


CHACOUR KOOP is a Real-Time reporter based in Kansas City. Previously, he reported for the Associated Press, Galveston County Daily News and Daily Herald in Chicago.