Behind Obama’s epistemological crisis: Ego and Animus between Obama and Trump played a big role

Obama was recently interviewed about his new memoir when he made an arousing observation: “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.”   

Epistemology is the perfect ten dollar word for the crisis. When history is written, we could indeed have different versions of truth depending on which news channels, newspapers or books historians use as reference. Yet the New York Times has already rewritten history with its 1619 Project, claiming the one we know is false so at closer inspection Obama might have been more perspicacious if he recognized that the crisis he speaks of has already been well entered into. Despite many believing the reality distortion started when Donald Trump became president,  Obama had a hand in shaping this. Like a social stealth bomber, he is hard to see coming as he eloquently glides in to deliver his rhetorical payload. It is in the aftermath that the carnage becomes visible. Trump takes the blame for a situation of Obama’s making.   

But before we dive into their competing truth narratives, we have to talk about the odium that seeded the animus. As long-standing enemies, the visceral contempt and simultaneous jealousy between Obama and Trump have been akin to parents undergoing a high-conflict divorce. It’s no wonder the kids are not alright and have vehemently taken sides.

Seeding contempt

Obama’s scorn, initially driven by Trump’s doltish and relentless accusation that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, was famously revealed during a 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, in which he made the entire room burst into raucous laughter at the expense of Trump. Obama’s insults stung: "[Trump] 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?" 

Fast forward a decade, the fervent ill-will remains. As Esquire’s Charles P. Pence so astutely pointed out in his post: President Obama has set up light housekeeping in Donald Trump’s cerebellum, Obama is showing his “snarkmaster” personality as he takes joy trolling Trump. 

Evidence of that was on display when Obama toured the country this fall, seemingly spending more time mocking Trump than praising Biden.

In the memoir interview, Obama continued his assault, saying he’s not surprised that Americans voted in a right-wing populist, but “I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.” He also emasculated Trump by portraying him as less than manly. “There was a code… the code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the 30s and 40s and before that. There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully -- in fact he defends the vulnerable against bullies. And so even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarch, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich--the complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure.”

In between his snarkiness, Obama’s rhetorical prowess seduces many into believing the benevolent president of hope isn’t a mean-spirited vengeful bully, notwithstanding his endless derision. He’s rendered honest, accurate, witty and justified. It is why Obama could so easily fly below the radar and insidiously charge up the national narrative’s divisive rhetoric on race without anyone knowing what hit them. It helped that news outlets and tech distribution platforms have become extensions of the liberal party.

Media silos promoting competing narratives

Trump is assailed for calling much of mainstream media fake news. The Trumpian style of astute observations distilled down to a label, while sometimes viewed as bullying, is also perceived as incisive. But make no mistake, Obama was first to call fake, accusing Fox News of purveying conspiracy theories that demonized him. Obama just used a lot of words.

“The issue was not a lack of schmoozing,” Obama said, referring to the gridlock he believed Republicans created. “The issue was that they found it politically advantageous to demonize me and the Democratic Party. This was amplified by media outlets like Fox News. Their voters believed this, and over time Republicans became so successful in their demonization that it became very difficult for them to compromise, or even be seen being friendly.” Obama sees Fox News everywhere just as the right sees CNN in every airport. “If Fox News isn’t on every television in every barbershop and VFW hall, then it might be a Sinclair-owned station, and the presuppositions that exist there, about who I am and what I believe, are so fundamentally different, have changed so much, that it’s difficult to break through. I come out of this book very worried about the degree to which we do not have a common baseline of fact and a common story.”

He then goes on to blame right-wing media for shaping the Republican party. “I’ve said this before: The problem facing the Republican Party, the conservative movement, whatever you want to call it, goes back to the attitudes of the base—attitudes that have been shaped by right-wing media. And so essentially what Republican elected officials have done is to say to themselves that in order to survive, we have to go along with conspiracy theorizing, false assertion, fantasies that Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh and others in that echo chamber have concocted, because people believe them.”

One can only surmise that Fox’s rising popularity and criticism of Obama, motivated other outlets to come to the defense of him and the progressive ticket against right-wing lies. When Trump came into office the media’s criticism and defense of the presidency became more apparent and partisan, albeit in reverse. Like children guarding their favored parent, the media accelerated their transformation into political activists fighting fiercely for their version of truth to prevail. 

Why racism is 2020’s epistemological crisis

There are many different truth claims that Obama is likely referring to. The most recent debates have been focused on the efficacy of mask wearing and lockdowns and the prevalence of voter fraud. But the current definitive argument on truth involves the nature of racism: It is systemic in our culture and institutions, victimizing blacks until equal outcomes are achieved. Or it is a manifestation of human sin irrespective of external systems. 

Trump champions the latter because anyone can be racist. Obama champions the former because he can lay the racism accusation at the feet of conservatives. As the popular election memes say: “Trump supporters may not be racist, but they certainly decided it wasn’t a deal killer.” Race has become the social and political kill switch for debate and conversation. If you step out of the approved narrative, you are no longer with us, and you have moved from binary 1 to a 0. You may not be a racist, but you’ve decided racism isn’t a “deal killer.” Which, by the way, is just a passive aggressive way of calling you a racist. 

The fact that Obama was the very first black American to become president always made  “race” hard to ignore though many, like myself believed Obama’s presidency meant a new racial order. But Obama and Hillary weren’t inclusive, they labeled (deplorables) and bullied in their own silky smooth way, and they lost the national mandate in the process. Michelle Obama also seemed to play a significant role in cultivating the systemic racism meme. If Obama’s reference to her is any clue, she appears to harbor a lot of resentment. Michelle was the target of malign emails by Republican officials who compared her to “animals,” he said. Obama also noted that Michelle “tends to be a little bit more pessimistic about human nature.”  The core themes of her public presence, including her less-than-hopeful speech at the 2020 DNC, seem to have become “white flight”, white supremacy and systemic racism. 

Those issues are important, but they aren’t the center of the national zeitgeist. Even Obama hinted as much. In the memoir interview Obama makes an important statement, though it’s lost in the discussion of today, that he’s not sure if Trump’s 2016 win was based on racism or an anti-liberalism strain. “It’s difficult to clearly say how much of this was race, as opposed to opposition to liberalism,” he said. I believe Obama sees the underlying truth, that Republicans aren’t stepping over racism, they are stepping away from liberalism. 

My sense is that in 2016, race played a much smaller role than anti-liberalism, anti-establishment and anti-Hillaryism. Yet Obama’s thin-skin when it comes to microaggressions amplifies race. While he likes to quip that Trump “ain’t all that tough” because he can’t take the media heat. Obama cries a river when he’s the target of their ire. 

“What I think is indisputable is that I signified a shift in power. Just my mere presence worried folks, in some cases explicitly, in some cases subconsciously… And then there were folks around to exploit that and tap into that. If a Fox News talking head asks, when Michelle and I dap, give each other a fist bump, ‘Is that a terrorist fist bump?,’ that’s not a particularly subtle reference. If there’s a sign in opposition to the ACA in which I’m dressed as an African witch doctor with a bone through my nose, that’s not a hard thing to interpret.”  

Obama was referring to then Fox News reporter E.D. Hill’s gaffe reference to the fist bump Obama gave his wife in 2008. As for the witch doctor image, it was made by a NJ store owner who doctored a photo and placed it on his store window. Hill’s blunder was insensitive and the doctored photo was clearly inappropriate. But it is important to not take the exception and package them as the norm, that’s how we get to now highly polarized views with no clear path back to a shared understanding that most of the people on both sides are good and decent and want largely the same things - but with slightly different views on how to allocate the resources to get them. 

To be clear, Trump didn’t help matters. When he started making the so-called “birther” allegations against Obama, he also tried to delegitimize his intelligence by questioning how he got into Harvard. These insults became the basis of the “racist” narrative that began to take shape a decade ago. “Racist code underlies Trump’s rise,” wrote Politico. NPR published: “Confronting Trump’s coded racism.” 

By the time Trump decided to run for office in 2015, the racism narrative took off, much of which I talk about in my book Unequally Yoked. By dint of association or support of Trump, a person was labeled racist, even though Trump’s policies weren’t racist, and in fact many would argue upward mobility by minorities advanced significantly under his administration. Even some of his staunchest critics took issue with the racist label. Hendrik Hertzberg, a liberal political commentator opined that Trump’s contempt for Obama is more anti-elitist than racist. "Obama's erudition, his ivy-league-ness, his urbanity, his citizen-of-the-worldness, his foreign-sounding name, his respect for the authority of reason and science, his 'aristocratic' 'aloofness' (all of which I love, of course) are equally or more part of the package," Hertzberg told NPR, adding that racism is the latest evidence that conservative’s have a problem with the truth. 

“The dismaying truth is that birtherism is part of a larger pattern of rejection of reality that has taken hold of intimidating segments of one of the two political parties,” wrote Hertzberg. “It is akin to the view that global warming is a hoax, or that the budget can be balanced through spending cuts alone, or that contraception causes abortion, or that evolution is just another theory, on part with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old.”

We do live in an epistemological crisis if we hold on to our truth claims with such vigor. We live in a crisis if Al Sharpton, who promulgated the famous Tawana Brawley hoax, is scolding the country on MSNBC that “we’re now in a nation where facts don’t matter. You make up facts. And not only do you have an alternative reality, how do you debate someone that is dealing with a totally fictitious premise?” We live in a crisis when Joe Biden says it’s “time to heal” and “not to divide but unify” when many from his party want to cancel Trump supporters. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich tweeted: “When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.” I’m not sure that’s how Nelson Mandela would have tweeted it.  

Obama’s epistemological solution

So what to do about this crisis Obama has identified? One can take Obama’s antidote to fight discouragement with gallows humor and “laughter to fight off despair.” Or we can embrace one indisputable truth: black Americans are free, and the fact that Trump doubled the votes of this racial group suggests many of them think the victim narrative is an overplayed fiction.  

Obama has succinctly captured the current national crisis. He has hinted that he knows the underlying challenges for Democrats aren’t racism, but some aspects of liberalism. He’s even questioned the efficacy of the woke movement. This is good. But not good enough if racism blinds his ability to pursue the truth. To wit: On the “The Breakfast Club” radio show, Obama showed how little he understood the many Hispanic evangelicals who don’t like the anti-capitalist leanings of the left. “There are a lot of evangelical Hispanics who, you know, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans or puts detainees, you know, undocumented workers in cages — they think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion,” Obama said. 

Obama’s words were a lost opportunity that threw more fuel on the race fire and ignored reality.  

To address this epistemological crisis, there’s one more move he and his wife can make on the national chess board: articulate the other side and acknowledge their reality. If the Obamas want to go high, as Michelle lectures many to do, and become the pan-American voice they clearly aspire to be, then they have to move beyond packaging corner-case incidents as systemic racism, and use their prodigious gifts of articulation to explain both sides of the issues confronting our nation. 

In other words, Obama can use his gift of communication skills to articulate why an anti-capitalism stance is hurting his party, and embrace the indisputable truth: black Americans are free, and the fact that Trump doubled the votes of this racial group suggests many of them think the victim narrative is an overplayed fiction.