While running for president in 2008, Barack Obama was dogged by negative press over his close relationship with a pastor who had made incendiary and arguably racist, anti-Semitic and anti-American remarks. It almost cost him the election.
This year, accusations of anti-Semitism and racism roiled Donald Trump’s campaign and have followed him into his transition. Trump must learn from how Obama handled his controversy or it could cost him his presidency.
Obama received intense scrutiny over his close association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, head pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Media reviews of some of Wright’s sermons showed that Wright had suggested that America brought the 9/11 attacks on itself, that the U.S. government’s treatment of Indian tribes amounted to genocide and that the U.S. supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and South Africa.
Wright wasn’t just Obama’s pastor. He was also the man who had baptized the Obamas’ daughters and to whom Obama had dedicated his book The Audacity of Hope.
As the Rev. Wright controversy began to get some traction in the press, Obama gradually began to distance himself from his pastor. Obama disavowed Wright’s comments in a series of TV and radio appearances before finally giving a speech titled “a more perfect union,” in which he said he was “outraged” and “saddened” by Wright’s behavior.
In that speech, in March 2008, Obama tried to put Wright’s remarks in historical perspective. But the criticism persisted, and Obama was forced to continue to denounce Wright’s remarks while defending his relationship with his pastor. Finally in May of that year, the Obamas resigned their membership in Trinity United and more forcefully disavowed the Rev. Wright.
The breakup was a long and fitful process that damaged Obama’s credibility with many voters. Obama’s relationship with the incendiary Rev. Wright contradicted the idea at the core of his campaign: That he was a uniter who could heal racial divisions and bring the country together.
Donald Trump faces a similar problem with the alt-right, a far-right ideology that promotes white nationalism, racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism and that has an addiction to provocation. Trump’s candidacy was a good fit for the alt-right. His peddling of conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace, tough talk on immigration and call for a ban on Muslim immigrants gave energy to the movement.
Steve Bannon, who served as the Trump campaign’s CEO and whom Trump has hired as his “chief strategist and senior counselor” until recently headed Breitbart News, where his goal was to make the publication a “platform for the alt-right.”
After a year and a half of downplaying and dismissing the support he has received from the alt-right, Trump finally took a step in the right direction on Nov. 22 when he made a statement about a group of alt-righters gathered for a conference in Washington, D.C. “I don’t want to energize the group,” he told the New York Times. “And I disavow the group. It’s not a group I want to energize. And if they are energized I want to look into it and find out why.”
But the lesson of Jeremiah Wright is that one disavowal is not enough. Trump must continue to publicly denounce and disavow the alt-right, and do so in the clearest terms possible. One idea would be to deliver a speech similar to Obama’s Rev. Wright speech to make it clear that he repudiates the movement and everything it stands for. More realistically, Trump could make regular disavowals on Twitter, where the alt-right has a strong presence.
Even this may be asking too much. So far since winning the election, Trump has seemed more willing to train his sights, or his Twitter outbursts, on other targets, such as the cast of the Broadway play “Hamilton” than to address his intensifying alt-right problem.
But by failing to address it, Trump will allow his adversaries to continue to portray him and his supporters as racists. Of course, most of his supporters aren’t racists. But Trump must acknowledge that he does have supporters who are racists and many others who seem comfortable being in the company of racists. It’s time for Trump to do all he can to erase the taint of racism, or it may come to define, and perhaps destroy, his presidency.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
