“If Obama had a son, he’d attack the White House Correspondents Dinner like Cole Allen,” Randy Barnett, a Georgetown law professor and prominent libertarian activist, wrote on X earlier this week.
The claim that a former president’s hypothetical son would have attempted to assassinate President Trump is insane. Barnett’s hypothesizing about the motives of a nonexistent male child of Barack Obama is part of a conservative fixation that’s detached from historical reality. Yet it feeds a collective sense of victimization that Trump shares and has deftly exploited.
[Graeme Wood: The most frightening shooters are the smart ones]
The reference, for those who don’t closely follow conservative news sources, was to a line Obama uttered in 2012. After Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, Black leaders criticized the president for failing to speak out. Obama, appearing in the Rose Garden, said, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Ever since, the political right has turned the phrase into a notorious synecdoche for the Obama presidency. Conservatives continue to repeat the line, years later, which is why Barnett was able to reference it as shorthand. For some on the right, Obama’s remark is the most emblematic moment of his presidency, hauled out again and again by Fox News, Breitbart, and other right-leaning news outlets to remind them of his responsibility for racial strife.
As Ben Shapiro put it last year on Ezra Klein’s podcast, “The implicit promise of Barack Obama was the worst conflict in the history of America—which is the racial history of the United States, which is truly horrifying. That in his person, he was basically going to be the capstone of the great movement toward Martin Luther King’s dream. And when, instead, things seemed to move in the opposite direction, which was: Well, you know, it turns out that Black people in America, they’re inherently victimized by a white-supremacist system that puts Black people underfoot. And: My son could have been Trayvon.”
Shapiro explained, “The reaction of the right was: This is an interest group–based politics that does not particularly like the founding, and we are going to react to that with Trumpism.”
It is hardly unusual for a president to acknowledge his ethnic heritage. Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden liked to play up their Irish American background. Just this week, Trump touted his mother’s Scottish background.
It may feel to conservatives as though Obama was talking about his race all the time; perhaps that is because they keep reminding one another of the rare prominent instance he did so. Obama delivered a memorably nuanced address about race as a candidate, then mostly avoided mention of it throughout his presidency. If Obama had spoken about his race more frequently, conservatives would not rely so heavily on the singular example. His remark about Martin being Black like him has been endlessly repeated by conservatives because it was the exception rather than the rule.
It is true that the American political discourse around race changed during and after Obama’s presidency. Progressive Americans became more conscious of racism, and many white Americans grew more resentful. In progressive spaces, it became common for mob-style panics to hyperbolize trauma and shut down criticism.
[Jonathan Chait: How liberal America came to its senses]
Yet Obama was an early and forceful critic of that tendency. He attacked the left over and over and over again for intolerance and dogmatism on the subject of race. The right’s insistence on ignoring those repeated entreaties, and instead fixating on a single moment when he expressed empathy with the parents of a murdered Black teen, reveals far more about conservatives than it does about Obama.
And this is especially true because Obama’s commentary about Trayvon Martin was, in reality, quite mild. Whereas conservatives invoke the line as if Obama had performed some version of Garrett Morris’s famous SNL sketch (“I’m gonna get me a shotgun and kill all the whiteys I see!”), his comments were measured and empathetic: “Obviously, this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through.” He added, “All of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.”
Obama took pains to avoid prejudging the case, and urged the country to use it for unity rather than division. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids. And I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this. And that everybody pulls together.” He didn’t say anything about white supremacy. He merely pointed out that his children have a similar skin color as Trayvon Martin’s, which is factually correct. Shapiro likes to say, “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” but the key word here seems to be your—Shapiro’s feelings are another matter altogether.
A decade and a half later, Obama’s remarks about Trayvon Martin present a sobering contrast with the current president. Trump’s supporters have constructed an elaborate double standard to ignore his fire hose of lies and incendiary rhetoric, which they dismiss as “mean tweets” or otherwise inconsequential. They have justified doing so in large part by turning Obama into a chimerical monster who supposedly launched the racial war that Trump must now win.
Yet the strongest evidence they can marshal for Obama’s alleged provocation is rhetoric that is more thoughtful, dignified, and presidential than anything Trump has said in his entire time in the White House.
The post The Mysterious Obsession With Obama’s Fake Son appeared first on The Atlantic.
