Obama's chumminess with Trump doesn't seem to have helped anyone

Where in the world is Michelle Obama? And why is her husband sharing laughs with Donald Trump?

The answers are likely connected.

She is a leading light among political opposition to Trump’s threat to progressive policies on race, abortion and gender rights. She seemingly wanted no part of fake smiles and pretense in dealing with Trump, either at President Jimmy Carter’s funeral or at Trump’s second inauguration.

President Obama, no doubt, felt compelled as a former president to attend both, as an act of respect for the highest office in the land.

Okay. But why normalize Trump by getting chummy with him at the Carter funeral?

President George W. Bush attended the funeral and essentially shunned Trump. But if Obama had done that, it would have been worse than not showing up at all. It would have even added fuel to racial fires.

In my new book, “New Prize for These Eyes — The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement,” I tell the story of Trump’s political rise as the hero of a white populist backlash to the election of the first Black president.

Trump started his political rise by questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency. As a high-profile promoter of the “birther” conspiracy theory, Trump sowed the provocative idea that the Black man in the Oval Office wasn’t an American. Obama ultimately had to produce his long-form birth certificate to shut down that slander.

Obama got some payback by trolling Trump at a White House Correspondent’s Dinner as a self-important, buffoonish character. Trump was furious and, according to some accounts, took the jokes as insults. He then used them to fire up his run for the presidency. From the start of his campaigns for the White House, Trump has enflamed racial tension, often by pointing to Obama.

In his first inaugural address, Trump excoriated Obama’s two terms as a period of “American carnage,” violence in big cities, and said that America’s jobs left and factories closed in Middle America under Obama.

And in Trump’s first term, he termed the entire Black Lives Matter movement as a “symbol of hate” and alleged voter fraud in cities with large Black and Latino populations. Trump claimed to be a friend of Black people, even as he was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan’s official newspaper.

When he was asked what he would say to white militia groups during the 2020 campaign, his simple answer was “stand back and stand by.”

He urged his supporters on to the U.S. Capitol to stop certification of Trump’s loss in the presidential race, helping incite a riot that famously featured a large confederate flag paraded through the Capitol.

After George Floyd’s murder by a policeman led to mammoth multiracial marches across America and the globe, Trump targeted Black Lives Matter directly. He labeled the marches as violent events led by antifa and political radicals, despite evidence that the marches were largely peaceful.

His Make America Great Again movement continues to stand in direct opposition to the second Civil Rights Movement's efforts to heal racial divisions through his efforts to cancel diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

He has now acted to end attention to bias against minorities in federal programs by placing DEI workers on leave. The history of discrimination against people of color is, to him, a nuisance. Mass incarceration of Black men and income inequality are another bother to him.

He said diversity programs stand opposed to “a society that is colorblind and merit based.”

In other words, unlike Obama, he believes there is no need to attend to racial wrongs of the past. And unlike BLM, he believes there is no need for attention to the economic and social wrongs of today from bad schools in Black neighborhoods and high rates of Black people killed by police.

Trump has seen Obama’s high approval ratings among white Americans. He knows that Black Lives Matter enjoyed majority white support as well as majority Latino and Black support after the Floyd murder. But that harmonious racial movement did not serve Trump’s political ends.

As he has done with demonization of immigrants, Trump uses racial division to advance his political standing. Even teaching young Americans about America’s racial history of slavery, segregation and discrimination, according to Trump, “teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves.”

So why would Obama sit next to this man and send a message of camaraderie that deflects from Trump’s ongoing efforts to undermine Obama’s legacy and racial unity in the country?

Could it be a matter of Obama slyly warning Trump about the dangers of a second term? Don’t forget that Obama left office with a 59 percent approval rating after two terms. Trump left after one term with a mere 34 percent approval rating.

Trump enters the second term as a lame duck with intense division among House Republicans. Senate Republicans are biting their tongues after Trump last week pardoned most of the January 6 rioters. About 60 percent of Americans, including 30 percent of Republicans, oppose the pardons. The best interpretation of Obama’s decision to engage Trump in boy’s club banter is that he was trying to warn him away from such divisive actions. Apparently, it didn’t have much success.

Maybe Michelle had the right approach.

Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for these Eyes: the Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”

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