‘DARK SPIRITS’

Obama Book: Trump Happened Because My Presidency ‘Spooked’ Racist Voters

In his new memoir “A Promised Land,” Obama wrote about how he’s wrestled with the notion that his historic success in 2008 helped unleash a wave of racism in America.

Barack Obama’s upcoming memoir is the most-anticipated book of the year, and it looks like it might actually live up to sky-high expectations. CNN has published several excerpts from A Promised Land of the former president being unusually frank about how his successor exploited the racism of millions of American voters. “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,” he writes. “For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, [Trump] promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.” Obama traces the source of mainstream racism in the GOP to Sarah Palin’s elevation in 2008, writing: “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.”