Former President Barack Obama confronts the roots of the racist politics of President Donald Trump in the first volume of his post-presidency memoir, A Promised Land, CNN reports.
According to the outlet, which obtained a copy of Obama's soon-to-be-released memoir, the former POTUS holds nothing back as he addresses Trump's rise to office and how the obstructionism by Republicans to his own Presidency as well as uncovering of the racist underbelly of America set the stage for Trump's political success.
"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."
In addition to noting how the "rise and validation" of Sarah Palin to the Republican presidential ticket in 2008 provided a "template for future politicians, shifting his party's center and the country's politics overall in a direction he abhorred," 44 also delved into and his own shortcomings as President, per CNN, calling his failure to pass immigration reform "a bitter pill to swallow."
Obama announced the first of two volumes of his presidential memoir back in September. He described the long-awaited book as "an honest accounting" of his life story, saying in a statement at the time, “There’s no feeling like finishing a book, and I’m proud of this one. I’ve spent the last few years reflecting on my presidency, and in A Promised Land I’ve tried to provide an honest accounting of my presidential campaign and my time in office: the key events and people who shaped it; my take on what I got right and the mistakes I made; and the political, economic and cultural forces that my team and I had to confront then — and that as a nation we are grappling with still. In the book, I’ve also tried to give readers a sense of the personal journey that Michelle and I went through during those years, with all the incredible highs and lows.”
The 768-page memoir comes two years after Obama's wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, released her recording-breaking memoir Becoming in 2018. The couple landed a multi-book deal with Crown for a whopping $65 million shortly after leaving the White House in 2017.
The first volume of A Promised Land will be released on November 17.
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