Obama Condemns Trump For ‘Birther’ Lies, Stoking Racial ‘Panic’

By Staff, Agencies

Former US president Barack Obama in a new memoir condemned US President Donald Trump for his promulgation of the “birther” lie that Obama was not born in the US, and for exploiting racial “panic” for his political benefit.

America’s first Black president wrote that his election to the White House played a role in Trump’s rise to power by stoking racial discord, and that the divisions in American “run deep.” Trump’s departure will not be enough to bridge the divide, he said.

“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.

“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 said of Trump, according to a Thursday report from CNN, which obtained a copy of the book.

Obama reflects on the four years since he left office in the memoir, titled “A Promised Land,” which goes on sale on Tuesday.

The crisis “has left the body politic divided, angry, and mistrustful,” he said in an excerpt published on Thursday in The Atlantic.

It has also “allowed for an ongoing breach of institutional norms, procedural safeguards, and the adherence to basic facts that both Republicans and Democrats once took for granted.”

Obama said he was “encouraged” by the election victory of his former vice president, Joe Biden, and his running mate Kamala Harris, and their “character and capacity to do what is right.”

“But I also know that no single election will settle the matter,” Obama wrote. “Our divisions run deep; our challenges are daunting.”