Trump not simply attempting to delegitimize black POTUS but rather the advances that made 1 possible
Trump was not simply attempting to delegitimize a black president but rather the advances that made one possible:
In 2011, the year Donald Trump became the standard-bearer for the racist campaign to challenge Barack Obama’s citizenship, he didn’t just lob conspiracies about the President’s birthplace; he also questioned how Obama gained admission to two Ivy League universities. “I heard he was a terrible student, terrible,” Trump remarked, to the Associated Press. “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I’m thinking about it. I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.” Coming just two days before Obama released his long-form birth certificate, the attack on the President’s educational background tipped Trump’s hand. He was not simply intent on delegitimizing the first black Presidency but also the processes that made one possible in the first place.
This broader theme was easy to miss in the scrum of last year’s campaign, as duelling perspectives debated whether “economic anxiety” or populist racism was the more active ingredient in Trumpism. Trump likely understood that this was always a false dichotomy. The dominant theme in the history of American populism, from the days of Tom Watson through those of George Wallace, is that resentful whites understand their economic status not in absolute terms but relative to the blacks whom they perceive as the true barometer of their standing. The question is not whether C.E.O.s have salaries hundreds of times larger than their own but whether black people have salaries comparable to theirs. The forces that have ravaged the American working classes were set loose four decades ago and were turbocharged by the end of the Cold War, but it took two terms of a black Presidency for much of this public to recognize that its fortunes were in a tailspin. Until 2008, this group had lacked a static landmark against which to measure whether it was moving backward or forward. Obama became that.
Thus Barack Obama and Donald Trump don’t simply represent successive Presidencies; they personify rival genealogies of our current moment, warring claims to history. Where Obama built a movement to shake off the dead hand of history, Trump was hoping to reanimate that hand and clench it into a fist.
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