Trump’s threats against Obama are very real — and dangerous

26.07.2025    Salon    5 views
Trump’s threats against Obama are very real — and dangerous

In January days before his second inauguration Donald Trump was seated next to Barack Obama at President Jimmy Carter s funeral In a surreal moment the two men were snickering and chumming it up like old friends In reality they deeply dislike each other Still Obama as America s first Black president knows he must publicly wear the mask It s the same mask Black people and specifically Black men have long been forced to wear to conceal their true emotions lest they liability being unfairly judged to be uppity angry hostile complicated not a squad contestant arrogant aloof dangerous violent Trump like other powerful white men has insufficient if any restrictions on showing his emotions His rage is permitted even celebrated Obama s politeness at the funeral would earn him no protection or respite from Trump and his agents Of syllabus Obama knew this He still chose to smile and laugh Such expected social graces are one of the unique burdens of being America s first Black president Obama s politeness at the funeral would earn him no protection or respite from Trump and his agents Of class Obama knew this He still chose to smile and laugh Such expected social graces are one of the unique burdens of being America s first Black president Now six months after their population conversation Trump and his agents are flooding the zone in a naked attempt to further distract from the growing Epstein shame and its charges of sexual misconduct And Obama is in their crosshairs On Tuesday Trump claimed that Obama had committed acts of treason by supposedly rigging the presidential voting process in an effort to keep him from defeating Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton It s there he s guilty Trump disclosed This was treason They tried to steal the referendum they tried to obfuscate the vote They did things that nobody s ever imagined even in other countries Trump provided no evidence for such a strong accusation But it did not stop there On his Truth Social platform Trump posted an AI-generated video of Obama being arrested in the White House and then perp-walked The traditional punishment for treason is execution In reality then-President Obama formally accused Russia of conducting an influence operation on social media and in other spaces in endorsement of Trump s presidential campaign This was largely proven to be true including by a Republican-led Senate review We have discovered irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling commented then-Sen Marco Rubio a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which carried out the analysis Rubio now serves as Trump s secretary of state On Tuesday Obama disclosed a message remarkable in its candor condemning the behavior of a sitting president in response to Trump s statements Out of respect for the office of the presidency our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response These bizarre statements are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the presidential polling but did not successfully manipulate any votes The following day Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard communicated that more evidence had been discovered supposedly implicating Obama Later that evening Attorney General Pam Bondi mentioned the Justice Department would be establishing a strike force to assess evidence of Obama s alleged treason and what actions should be taken Trump s accusations are not harmless partisanship or bluster The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reports that from July to July violent threats against Obama greatly increased across particular social media platforms Related In his vengeful second term Donald Trump becomes the hunter Threatening one s predecessor and other members of the opposition party with deportation prison or worse for non-existent crimes is a defining feature of authoritarian and fascist regimes Trump MAGA Republicans and other agents have made similar threats against leading Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden The president has also targeted former Rep Liz Cheney who served as vice-chair of the House of Representatives Jan Select Committee along with other Republicans and principled conservatives he deems disloyal NPR reports that Since when he began preparing for the presidential campaign Trump has issued more than threats to investigate prosecute imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents In an urgent essay at The American Progress Robert Kuttner warns that although the country has not reached full-on fascism yet we are in grave danger For us to survive Trump he writes the Supreme Court would have to decide that enough is enough and Trump would have to fail in his increasingly crude efforts to pre-annul the midterm balloting This may yet happen Trump could drown in his own bile But this descent into fascism is coming on faster and more flagrantly than almost anyone would have foreseen The president s authoritarian behavior and strongman threats against Obama are being amplified and made more powerful and dangerous by their racist underpinnings Trump has been accurately described as America s first White president As Ta-Nehisi Coates explained in It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump that he is a White man who would not be president were it not for this fact With one immediate exception Trump s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of Whiteness that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for majority of of them Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump s forefathers and barred others from it It is often commented that Trump has no real ideology which is not true his ideology is White supremacy in all its truculent and sanctimonious power To Trump Whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power In this Trump is not singular But whereas his forebears carried Whiteness like an ancestral talisman Trump cracked the glowing amulet open releasing its eldritch energies In the cosmology of Trump and the MAGA movement Obama is more than just a former president He is a symbol of progress along the color line the antithesis to Trump For Trumpism to fully cohere Obama and what he symbolizes must be torn down Social scientists and other experts have repeatedly shown that white racial resentment white racial animus racism and nativism are driving factors in advocacy for Trump and the MAGA movement To wit Trump s racist birtherism attacks on Obama helped catapult him to leadership of the American right-wing in and then to the presidency the following year A majority of Trump s supporters and other Republicans also believe in the racist conspiracy theory and lie that white people are being replaced in their own country by Black and brown people Want more sharp takes on politics Sign up for our free newsletter Standing Room Only written by Amanda Marcotte now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts Historian Peniel Joseph has compellingly framed Trumpism and the white backlash against Obama as a contemporary version of the th century White supremacist Redemption movement the counterrevolution that ended Reconstruction and replaced it with the White racial tyranny of the Black Codes and Jim and Jane Crow American apartheid In his book The Third Reconstruction Peniel writes Trump s electoral process and the rise of his MAGA movement represented a racial and political backlash deeply rooted in the history of the First Reconstruction Trump organized America around redemption politics on an unprecedented scale achieving a achievement that removed the veneer of national consensus around rhetorical aid for racial equality that had characterized the post-civil rights period White nationalism that transcended religious affiliations geographic diversity and generational divisions was Trump s m tier But Trump s brand of populism tapped into the raw racial politics of American history Trump targeted both President Obama and Black Lives Matter with a redemptionist assault on the meaning of American identity citizenship and democracy The message was simple A Black president threatened the end of the white nationalist republic that arose from Reconstruction s ashes On Jan one of Trump s MAGA foot soldiers waved a Confederate flag inside the Capitol a win even the Confederates never achieved during the Civil War This was a preview of the revanchist potency that Trump s return to power would unleash four years later in As leading historians such as Stephen Hahn Manisha Sinha David Blight and others have compellingly shown America s slave regime followed by Jim and Jane Crow apartheid were the country s native form of authoritarianism Those systems possessed countless if not all of the features of modern authoritarian regimes such as widespread surveillance mass incarceration policing of borders and limits on progress and freedom of association thought crimes book bans suppression of civil society and voting censorship paramilitaries legal and extralegal violence on a massive scale one-party rule a system of tiered citizenship and belonging a corrupt elite class and systematic violations of human and civil rights Trumpism the larger anti-democracy movement and white restoration project are being erected on these foundations At the same time they are simultaneously making international connections with autocratic regimes such as Viktor Orb n s Hungary and Vladimir Putin s Russia On a fundamental level racism and the race concept itself are based on a system of absurdities lies and fantasies of innate human difference based upon skin color This is pseudoscience Moreover racism in its various forms is an attempt to make a fantasy real and socially concrete The primary goal of this system of racial hierarchy and human classification is for the in-group to naturalize and legitimize its political social economic and other forms of control and power and exploitation over various out-groups Obama s real crime is symbolic He is America s first Black president His literal personhood and what it symbolizes is a violation of America s centuries-old racial order In all Trump s threats against Obama are an example of this fantasy world made dangerously real Of class Obama has not committed treason or chosen other high crime The fantasy-lie Trump is referencing of the Black beast criminal the usurper and negro domination the giant negro and imperiled and embattled whiteness has haunted the white collective imagination for centuries Obama s real crime is symbolic He is America s first Black president His literal personhood and what it symbolizes is a violation of America s centuries-old racial order As they laugh at or dismiss Trump s accusations of treason against the former president too multiple members of the mainstream media the liberal and centrist commentariat Democrats and other establishment types are also possessed by a dangerous fantasy Such voices believe per the Supreme Court s July ruling on presidential immunity that a former president cannot be charged with a crime one real or imagined that he committed while in office This conclusion is made practicable by the seductive power of white racial innocence and privilege the same kind that also convinced multiple white liberals that a man like Trump with his low values and behavior could never be president of the United States let alone twice With his return to power that white racial innocence and naivete were gravely injured which explains why plenty of white Americans are still shellshocked in the face of Trumpism and the larger right-wing anti-democracy movement We need your help to stay independent Subscribe in the modern day to patronage Chauncey DeVega s journalism As a group Black and brown Americans and white Americans who know the country s real complex history and worst tendencies were screaming that Trump s return to power would be a mishap Black and brown Americans are the miners canaries who don t have the luxury of collective racial innocence and privilege Unfortunately their warnings were not heeded Before he left on Friday for a trip to Scotland Trump admitted that Obama has presidential immunity It possibly helps him a lot the immunity ruling he disclosed In those same remarks Trump continued to accuse Obama of non-existent crimes America is increasingly no longer a country where no one is above the law and the law is independent and separate from the will of the president The Republican party has shown repeatedly that it is more loyal to Trump than to the rule of law Constitution and nation There were show trials in Stalin s Russia and other authoritarian regimes Trump if he so desires and commands his Department of Justice to proceed would likely get his as well Even if he does not drop the mask publicly Obama knows that Trump s accusations of treason are no idle threat The question now is whether he as one of the country s elder statesmen will boldly stand up in defense of democracy or let himself be symbolically pilloried or worse Read more about this topic No Black people may not be joining all of your protests But they are still resisting American slides into totalitarianism and it won t be easy to reverse What Mavis Staples can teach us about resisting Trumpism The post Trump s threats against Obama are very real and dangerous appeared first on Salon com

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