Trump's Hatred of Obama -- Envy, Revenge, and Race

Central to Donald Trump's presidency is the effort to erase President Obama's legacy – all of his policies, his social agenda, and even his very persona. The persistence and intensity of Trump’s rage and frustration with Obama betray motives other than mere politics. What exactly are those motives?

1. Obama Envy

Noam Shpancer, Ph.D., insight therapist and author of the novel The Good Psychologist, helps explain this hatred of Donald Trump …

“Trump will accept another person’s (or group’s) worth only to the extent that they approve of and serve Trump. There is no other independent test of merit. This is why the racism (and anti Semitism) explanation won't stick on Trump. Racism is an ideology, and a tribal cast of mind. Trump has neither ideology nor tribe, as he lacks the capacity to attach to either. He only has himself.”

Shpancer thinks this is also the same explanation for Trump's constant lying. He doesn't do it to further a social, political, or ideological agenda. He lies about the facts when the facts fail to fulfill his needs or flatter him.

Trump has a chronic and debilitating case of Obama envy. In Obama, Trump sees his antithesis, that is, a person who is everything he is not and cannot be. Shpancer says …

“Obama is a man in full: self-made, self-aware, self-contained, at peace with himself, at ease in the world, and capable of relating with people at eye level. He can laugh with others and at himself. By temperament, he's warm, emotionally stable, thoughtful, and open-minded … He traffics in inspiration.

“Trump is at his core indecent. As a man, he's forever fledgling. Propped up by his wealthy father well into middle age, he struggles mightily with self-control, by his own admission fears self-reflection, and is clearly incapable of a range of human emotions, from empathy to humor. He has no use for tenderness, the arts, or spiritual pursuits. Trump traffics in debasement.”

(Noam Shpancer. “The Psychology of Trump’s Preoccupation with Obama.”

Psychology Today. September 3, 2019.)

2. Revenge

Trump pushed the unfounded theory beginning around 2011 that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, rather than in Hawaii, and was therefore ineligible to be president. Trump also floated the idea that Obama's birth documents may label him a Muslim. He even claimed that he had proof that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. When Obama eventually released his long-form birth certificate, Trump claimed credit for getting the president to do so. (Of course)

Conspiracy theories about Obama's supposed “secret Islamic” faith had been circulating since he first ran for the White House in 2008. Such unsubstantiated assertions often highlighted that his father was born into a Muslim family in Kenya, and that Obama received some instruction in the religion at the Indonesian public school he attended as a child.

Former first lady Michelle Obama writes in her memoir that President Donald Trump's promotion of the so-called birther movement is something she will "never forgive him for," citing the threats she said her family felt as a result of Trump's amplification of the conspiracy theory.

At the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Trump – aka “Mr. Birther” – was among the tuxedo-wearing guests. Trump had also been hinting, not for the first time, that he might launch his own bid for the presidency. There, President Obama mocked Trump's political ambitions without mercy.

Joking and “roasting” are traditionally features of the affair. Since the 1920s, the White House Correspondents’ Association holds this annual dinner to salute the First Amendment, honor award-winning journalism and recognize scholarship winners.

The dinner has long featured a professional comedian slinging jokes about the assembled journalists, administration types and the president. The president usually takes to the dais “to give as good as he gets,” roasting the journalists who cover him and inflicting a few self-deprecating zingers.

Obama roasted Trump for a full five minutes that evening, seeming to delight in directing zingers at the man who had questioned whether he was a legitimate president. He said …

"No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. That's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like: Did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?"

David Smith of The Guardian reported of the dinner in 2011: The room erupted as Obama pointed to a Photoshopped image of the then fantastical idea of a Trump White House, with three extra stories, a huge 'TRUMP' sign, a hotel, casino and golf course, a giant crystal chandelier, four gold columns and two women in swimwear drinking cocktails in the north lawn fountain.”

Trump, evidently, lacks a funny bone. It cannot stand criticism of any kind. Four years later, Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker magazine would recall:

“Trump’s humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man in a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him … he sat perfectly still, chin tight, in locked, unmovable rage.”

3. Race

Supporters can dispute Trump's racism, and if you ask him, he answers he isn’t racist. To the contrary, he’s repeatedly said that he’s “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.” Trump’s actual record, however, tells a very different story.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly made explicitly racist and otherwise bigoted remarks, from calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists to proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the US to suggesting a judge should recuse himself from a case solely because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.

The trend has continued into his presidency. From stereotyping a black reporter to pandering to white supremacists after they held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to cracking a joke about the Trail of Tears, Trump hasn’t stopped with the racist acts after his 2016 election.

The term “white fragility” is relevant to Trump's hatred of Obama. This condition – the disbelieving defensiveness that white people exhibit when their ideas about race and racism are challenged – is descriptive of white people’s paper-thin skin in our largely segregated society that is set up to insulate whites from racial discomfort.

A critical proportion of Republicans have enthusiastically supported the candidate who promised to turn back the demographic clock. Who better than sworn “Make America Great Again” candidate Donald Trump?

It is clear Trump's predecessor, President Obama really did activate voters – their hopes and also their fears. Trump subscribes to the racist theory that success or failure of a member of a racial group contributes to all in that group. He is a stanch white nationalist who manipulates his base while practicing dog-whistle politics – using rhetoric that operates in code. Terms such as “shithole countries” or “go back” are silent about race, but they provoke sharp racial reactions. Deception is everywhere.

How about Trump’s supporters? Do they support a racist? They reassure themselves that he and they are not racist by defining racism incredibly narrowly. Ian Haney Lopez of the Los Angeles Times reported that a supporter at a recent rally defended Trump against the charge of racism by insisting, “He didn’t say nothing about the color of somebody’s skin.” By implication, if Trump attacks people’s culture, religion or country of origin but avoids mentioning biology, it’s not racism.

Some social experts use the “quacks like a duck” evaluation based on statistics. Vanessa Williamson and Isabella Gelfand of the Brookings Institution wrote in their article “Trump and racism: What do the data say?” (2019) …

“When the data show that President Trump’s support stems from racist and sexist beliefs, and that his election emboldened Americans to engage in racist behavior, it is the responsibility of social scientists and other political observers to say so.”

The fragility theory has deep roots in reverse discrimination. It is sown by media pundits like Rush Limbaugh, honored as “one of the founders of the modern conservative movement.” He told his millions of listeners in 2009:

“How do you get promoted in a Barack Obama administration? By hating white people, or even saying you do, or that they’re not good, or whatever. Make white people the new oppressed minority, and they are going along with it, because they’re shutting up. They’re moving to the back of the bus.”

Ezra Klein, editor-at-large and founder of Vox, speaks of the 2012 reelection campaign in which Obama won merely 39 percent of the white vote – a smaller share than Michael Dukakis had commanded in 1988. That is to say, a few decades ago, the multiracial Obama coalition couldn’t drive American politics; but by 2012, it could.

After Obama's two terms, race once again played a huge part in Trump's election.Joy-Ann Reid, Host, NBC New's “AM Joy," declares:

“The seeds of Trump's victory were sown the moment Obama won … 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.”

Race once more emerged as a divisive issue grounded in Trump's nationalist agenda. He used a real white, blue-collar American fear of the browning of America to his advantage. Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel reported in The Nation (2017) …

“In short, our analysis indicates that Donald Trump successfully leveraged existing resentment towards African Americans in combination with emerging fears of increased racial diversity in America to reshape the presidential electorate, strongly attracting nativists towards Trump and pushing some more affluent and highly educated people with more cosmopolitan views to support Hillary Clinton. Racial identity and attitudes have further displaced class as the central battleground of American politics.”

The Continuous Reference

Now, while seeking reelection, Trump continues to embrace white identity politics. An analysis of the president’s tweets in the Trump Twitter Archive shows that Obama was mentioned or berated 246 times during Trump's 951 days in office.

A November 2019 analysis from CNN's Daniel Dale shows Trump has mentioned Obama and the Obama administration by name more frequently in the past 18 months than he had in the first 18 months of his presidency. Dale wrote …

"Through October, Trump had mentioned Obama by name 537 times during 2019 as a whole -- an average of 1.8 times per day."

Obama is a rhetorical crutch for Trump to defend his own decisions. This defense reeks of deflection and distraction. Yes, the strategy is definitely political, yet even more disturbing, it is deeply personal and based on envy and prejudice of a black president. And, of course Trump’s criticism of Obama helps rally the president's conservative base of voters heading into the 2020 election.

Culture critic and author Henry Giroux believes that racism in the Obama era is different from the historical “crude racism with its biological referents and pseudo-scientific legitimations.”

This new breed of racism, Giroux wrote, “cynically recodes itself within the vocabulary of the civil rights movement, invoking the language of Martin Luther King Jr., to argue that individuals should be judged by the ‘content of their character’ and not by the color of their skin.”

Salim Muwakkil – American journalist, senior editor at In These Times and an op-ed columnist for the Chicago Tribune – concludes …

“Giroux’s statement differentiating 'crude racism' from subtler forms could not be written today, given not only the rise of the alt-right but also the mainstreaming of the rhetoric of white supremacy and Trump’s wink-and-a-nod toward white nationalism. The president himself has self-identified as a 'nationalist.' He didn’t have to add “white” – his supporters knew what that meant. With his demagoguery and his 'birther' campaign, among other racist schemes, Donald Trump gave permission to the brewing backlash against Obama.”