November 12, 2020
Mark Slapinski with files from the Daily Mail
UNITED STATES - Barack Obama is releasing a new memoir titled A Promised Land - slated for release on Amazon on November 17. In the book, Obama talks about how he believes Republicans are xenophobic and that Trump’s rise to power was due to racism.
‘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 in the book, which was obtained by CNN.
“For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, [Trump] promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”
Barack Obama
His mentions of Trump come through the prism of Trump’s criticism of himself, including fanning the lie that Obama was not born in the United States.
He notes Trump’s musings were originally seen as a joke but he came to regard them as part of the Republican Party’s attempts to appeal to white Americans’ anxieties about the first black president.
‘In that sense, there wasn’t much difference between Trump and Boehner or McConnell. They, too, understood that it didn’t matter whether what they said was true,’ he writes, adding: ‘In fact, the only difference between Trump’s style of politics and theirs was Trump’s lack of inhibition.’
In addition to calling out Republicans and Donald Trump, Obama also admitted to being a smoker, sometimes smoking up to 10 cigarettes a day.
Obama promoted his new memoir via Twitter, but stopped short of using his social media platform to call out Trump’s racism.