Obama Blames Sarah Palin for Rise of Donald Trump
In his new post-presidency memoir, former President Barrack Obama explicitly states that his election in 2008 gave rise to racial tensions in the United States that he says President Donald Trump exploited for political purposes. He also accuses former Gov. Sarah Palin, the vice presidential nominee in 2008, of unleashing “xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, and antipathy towards black and brown folks” in the Republican Party, giving way to Trump’s rise.
“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 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. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”
Obama’s memoir, titled “A Promised Land,” details his childhood, rise in politics, historic presidential campaign, and the first four years of his presidency. The book, which is due out Nov. 17, is the first volume of a planned two-volume work. In excerpts from the book published by CNN, Obama accuses the Republican Party, and Palin in particular, of making racist and conspiratorial attitudes mainstream.
“Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party — xenophobia, anti intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward Black and brown folks — were finding their way to center stage,” Obama writes.
He said he “wonder(s) sometimes” about whether the late 2008 Republican nominee John McCain would still have chosen Palin if he had known “her spectacular rise and her validation as a candidate would provide a template for future politicians, shifting his party’s center and the country’s politics overall in a direction he abhorred.” (Read more from “Obama Blames Sarah Palin for Rise of Donald Trump” HERE)
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