NOT BACK FAR ENOUGH:

The overpowering insanity of the past five years has drowned out most memories of the "birther" episode that Obama recounts in his book. Looking back, the conspiracy theory and all that went along with it feels like a disturbing early warning sign of the terrifyingly unstable course that U.S. politics had begun to chart. Beginning around early 2011, Trump began publicly questioning Obama's place of birth, but he also went much further. Trump cast aspersions on Obama's intelligence, suggesting that his grades, concealed in unreleased college transcripts, must have been poor and that the erudite writing of his previous book, "Dreams From My Father," meant that a ghostwriter must have penned it.

This was ugly stuff. It was also popular, building Trump's news media profile and kickstarting his successful political career. The media at the time mostly didn't endorse Trump's theories. Yet, in a pattern that would disastrously repeat during his 2016 election campaign, outlets also couldn't get enough of his wacky sensationalism, providing wall-to-wall national publicity for the future president free of charge.

At the behest of his advisers, Obama writes in his memoir that he tried to downplay potentially divisive racial issues in his rhetoric and focus on unifying messages. As the Trump-orchestrated birther frenzy heated up during Obama's first term, the president reflected on a hostile reaction to his presidency that was no longer merely about politics. In some quarters of the American public, there was an "emotional, almost visceral" feeling, Obama writes, that "the natural order had been disrupted" by the election of a Black man like him to the presidency. [...]

This is a subtext of Obama's memoir: The story of how, starting with the birtherism episode, the embers of an unhinged majoritarian backlash to his presidency fanned into an inferno that consumed the Republican Party along with much of the broader conservative movement. A common undercurrent to conservative arguments about immigrants and minorities is that when they ask for accommodations or special recognition from society, they are inevitably eroding its intellectual and cultural standards. After watching many conservatives spend years defending intellectual train wrecks like Palin and Trump, it's difficult to take such claims seriously. With so many people having been driven out of their minds by a Black president, there is little reason to think that Trump's narrow defeat in the 2020 election is going to improve that condition.

Obama's faults as a president are there for us to criticize. He failed to rein in a rampaging national security state. There were ugly compromises with Wall Street and, more generally, a perceived coziness with a corrupt ruling establishment. In a way that he does not really confront in the book, those failures helped lay the groundwork for a populist backlash now coming from both the right and the left.

There was one thing Obama, to his credit, did understand very well: how a mix of celebrity, xenophobia, and paranoia might prove a winning formula for a hostile takeover of American democracy, perhaps even putting an end to the liberal order of which he himself is a product.

"What I knew was that he was a spectacle, and in the United States of America in 2011, that was a form of power. Trump trafficked in a currency that, however shallow, seemed to gain more purchase with each passing day," Obama writes. "Far from being ostracized for the conspiracies he'd peddled, he in fact had never been bigger."

Tweet   @brothersjudd