Barack Obama has said Donald Trump 'promised an elixir for the racial anxiety' of 'millions of Americans spooked by a black man in the White House', in his eagerly awaited memoir 'A Promised Land'. The former president writes that Trump understood the 'deep-seated panic' triggered by his presidency and capitalised on the 'birther' lie that Obama was not born in the United States.
Obama traces the roots of Trumpism to Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate, and the Tea Party movement. He writes that Palin helped bring 'xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks' to centre stage of the modern Republican party.
The 768-page book, the first of two volumes, covers Obama's rise from the US Senate to the White House as the 44th president, from 2009 to 2017. Penguin Random House reportedly paid the Obamas $65m for their memoirs; Michelle Obama's 'Becoming' was published in 2018.
Obama describes writing the book as a struggle, noting that a more gifted writer could have told the same story with greater brevity. He also reflects on his choice of Joe Biden as an emissary to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, acknowledging the challenge of dealing with the notoriously hardline conservative.
The memoir is released as Donald Trump refuses to concede the presidential election to Joe Biden, deepening political divisions. Obama argues that Trump's style of politics differed from establishment Republicans only in his lack of inhibition.
