(THE BLAZE) – In his new post-presidency memoir, former President Barrack Obama explicitly states that his election in 2008 gave rise to racial tensions in the United States that he says President Donald Trump exploited for political purposes. He also accuses former Gov. Sarah Palin, the vice presidential nominee in 2008, of unleashing “xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, and antipathy towards black and brown folks” in the Republican Party, giving way to Trump’s rise.
“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. “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.”
