Obama believes his presidency played a role in Donald Trump's rise and the dark transformation of the Republican party. "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," he wrote. "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."
Similarly, he says the ideological shift in the Republican party can be traced back to when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate during the 2008 campaign. "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 centre stage."