Truth?
""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.""
VERY, VERY very TRUE:
"Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party -- xenophobia, anti intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward Black and brown folks -- were finding their way to center stage," Obama writes"
The reason many left McCain. His largest failing. And Obama nails that too
"Obama writes that he "wonder(s) sometimes" about whether 2008 Republican nominee John McCain would still have picked Palin if he had known "her spectacular rise and her validation as a candidate would provide a template for future politicians, shifting his party's center and the country's politics overall in a direction he abhorred."
"I'd like to think that given the chance to do it over again, he might have chosen differently," Obama writes. "I believe he really did put his country first."
and he doesnt spare the GOP
"Trump's antics were seen initially in the White House as a joke. But Obama writes he came to regard Trump's media ubiquity and characteristic shamelessness as merely an exaggerated version of the Republican Party's attempts to appeal to White Americans' anxieties about the first Black president -- a sentiment he said "had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center -- an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology.
Trump . . . had determined that saying or behaving in ways previously seen as distasteful or unacceptable now earned him constant media attention.
"In that sense, there wasn't much difference between Trump and Boehner or McConnell. They, too, understood that it didn't matter whether what they said was true," he writes, adding: "In fact, the only difference between Trump's style of politics and theirs was Trump's lack of inhibition."
