So incoherent is Donald Trump’s reign, so criminal, stupid and impulsive that, incredibly, it seems that even the vaguest possibility the president could be a paedophile is the only thing which can unify the nation. To distract from the rising water, Trump has resorted to a time-honoured American tactic: turning attention towards the trusty bogeyman of the black male.
Earlier this week, his administration released thousands of irrelevant documents on Martin Luther King Jr, none of them salacious or damning in any way, or even historically significant. Just days before, Trump had reposted an AI video of Barack Obama being pushed to the floor and arrested in the Oval Office, and then pacing and sitting in a prison cell wearing an orange jumpsuit. This was apparently part of a strategy: the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, alleges a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” in which Obama supposedly tried to sabotage Trump’s election campaign, and that Obama’s administration attempted a “coup” by manufacturing intelligence showing Russian election interference. The man who loves to scream about “fakes” and “hoaxes” is now, not surprisingly, orchestrating phoney accusations into his own outlandish fraud.
Trump has been waiting all the time he has been president to lunge at Obama. Even before landing in the White House, Trump falsely accused Obama for years of not being born in the US, and thus ineligible to be president, all the while sneeringly implying Obama’s disloyalty to country by referring to him as Barack Hussein Obama. In some eerie way, Trump smells a fearful symmetry between him and his obsession. Obama remains the one political opponent Trump truly fears, an alpha political animal burning bright in the forests of the American night every bit as much as the self-anointed king from Queens.
The gamble of Obama’s original campaign was to make what could have been his greatest liability – his race – into a political asset. In a country anguished by war, and frightened by George W Bush’s absent response to Hurricane Katrina, people were surprised to hear that the US’s profoundest problem was not war or the moral efficacy of its leaders, but America’s racial divisions. Americans listened to Obama thunder about the “creed… whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: yes, we can”. Obama made sure to insert references to “immigrants” and “pioneers” in his stirring addresses to the nation, but the theme he constantly returned to was the country’s primal wound of race and the urgent necessity of healing it. Having made race a national emergency, Obama, a black male, was positioning himself as the only figure who could come to the country’s rescue.
Obama dared America to perceive his very self as the representation of the violence that haunted white America’s imagination. But as Obama materialised the threat, as it were, he conjured it away. The fact was, as his team made sure every American knew, he was only half-black. He was distant from his Kenyan father; he had been raised by his white mother. He had been safely processed through Columbia and Harvard. He was gracious, civil and polite to a fault. White liberals announced they were shedding tears of happiness at Obama’s election. But black people – while they too celebrated – held their breath for him to come through on the promises he had made.
He never did. Swept into power during the Great Recession with a mandate Trump has never had, Obama found himself in a space no American president had inhabited since FDR. Black leaders implored him to implement a programme that would create jobs on a huge scale; he also could have poured money into housing and education for black people. Go big, they beseeched him, you will never have another opportunity like this one. Instead the Harvard-conditioned Obama turned to his director of the National Economic Council, the Harvard icon Larry Summers, and went small. He broke his promises to black people, and to the disenfranchised. He bent his knee to the white status quo he had promised to restructure radically.
And yet Obama remains the 12th-most popular president in American history. The political effects of his presidency might have been disappointing, but the experience of having a man so warm with humanity, so cultivated, intelligent and playfully ironic was transporting. If anyone knew the US’s curse, and its blessing, it was a black man who, despite his biracial nature, had come through the American reality. A majority of Americans during Obama’s eight years in office felt they were in the hands of someone to whom they could, in that fantastical mental place every politician yearns to create, pour their hearts out to.
But this must be placed alongside the toxic racism Obama’s self-promoting tactic of racialism provoked, and which led directly to Maga. The two strains have coupled and produced the rough beast of an entirely new American reality. The feeling, cultivated by Obama himself, that American salvation was embodied in the experience of black Americans has now been fulfilled, darkly and ironically, by Trump, who is rapidly making more and more Americans feel like disempowered, insignificant outsiders. The conflict between the two epochs each man represents is a battle for which group has suffered the truest affliction. In the eyes of Maga, they are the real wretched of this Earth. The demonisation of American immigrants is, for them, the restoration of a new underclass that will repair their self-esteem. The threat to annul America’s only black president – Trump’s AI video of Obama is no less than that – is the coup de grace.
So where is Obama now, in the midst of America’s greatest crisis since the Civil War? He alone, of any American public figure, has the power to reduce Trump publicly to the fraud his preposterous bluster proves he is. Look at the photographs of Trump sitting alongside Obama in the White House just after Trump’s election in 2016; it is no coincidence that the AI arrest video was generated from that moment. While Obama, with masterful charm, holds the room in his hand, Trump stares at the floor, insecure, embarrassed, enraged at his inferiority. Obama might reply that it would be unprecedented for a previous president to denounce a sitting one. But Trump is unprecedented. His public humiliation of and shocking threat to Obama in that video is unprecedented. What is bad form compared to a nightmare of chaos and autocracy?
Obama himself, always alive to appearances, has merely “addressed” the general liberal spinelessness. At an exclusive gathering of liberal luminaries last week, he chastised them for being “cowed and intimidated and shrinking away from asserting what they believe, or least what they said they believe”. “What’s needed now is courage,” he declared. Yet as he did during his presidency, he is contented with golden phrases ringing with courage while displaying no courage at all. Instead, Obama and his successor have switched roles once again. Obama and his wife, Michelle, are set to executive-produce – it is almost too surreal to write – a comedy series about America history written by and starring that flame-throwing radical, 78-year-old Larry David, yet another of America’s comedic tribunes who lucratively specialise in trivialising even America’s most dangerous moment.
Obama won’t stand up to America’s tyrant. And the answer to the question of why he won’t – or cannot – could well be the answer to the question of how America came to its bizarre reckoning in the first place.
[Further reading: The plot against Zohran Mamdani]
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