The Seeds of Trump's Victory Were Sown the Moment Obama Won

A chilling, illuminating, and deeply important article. So vital to shine light on dark places. May these dark times spur us all along in our awakening and individual and collective actions toward the creation of a more connected, conscious, caring, just, and peaceful world. There is much work to be done! May we do it now. - Molly

People watch the inauguration of Donald Trump from the National Mall on Jan. 20, 2017

This is white America's reaction to the death

of the post-racial myth

By Joy-Ann Reid

Nine months into the Donald Trump administration, the United States seems eons removed from the country that just nine years ago elected its first black president.

Yet the racial divide that Trump demonstrated with his narrow Electoral College win was always there.

President Barack Obama read to a certain portion of white America as an unending attack on white Christian identity, centrality and cultural relevance. In their minds, he was seeking to end their right to bear arms and the right of conservatives to speak freely.

For this group of Americans, Trump has been the corrective. As Ta-Nehisi Coates points out in his brilliant Atlantic essay, “The First White President,” for Trump’s supporters, his election was itself the point. Putting a human wrecking ball against political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism and even decency was the ballgame.

Obama’s election masked this fierce racial schism for only a few short months. That ended the moment he declared, in July of his first year in the Oval Office, that a white Cambridge police officer acted “stupidly” for arresting a black college professor — and long-time Obama friend and mentor — outside his own home.

In that moment, the pleasant fiction of a “post-racial America” exploded. Police groups and Republican lawmakers pounced. Obama’s approval rating with white Americans dropped 8 points immediately, according to a Pew Research Center poll, from 53 percent to 46 percent. (Though his overall approval held steady at 54 percent.) It never recovered. Not even after a hastily staged “beer summit,” at which Vice President Joe Biden, Obama’s white working-class whisperer, played peacemaker.

Obama’s reaction to the incident dominated race-related discussions that summer, both in the mainstream media and, especially, right-wing talk radio. It joined health-care reform as a topic of intense racial polarization. And the decline in Obama’s popularity was particularly acute among working-class whites.

Three year’s later, Obama was re-elected despite being crushed by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney among every white American demographic. As Ron Brownstein explained in an election analysis for The Atlantic the following September:

“In 2012, Obama won a smaller share of white Catholics than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1980; lost groups ranging from white seniors to white women to white married and blue-collar men by the widest margin of any Democrat since Ronald Reagan routed Walter Mondale in 1984; and even lost among Democratic-leaning college-educated women by the widest margin since Michael Dukakis in 1988.”

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