Trump’s threats against Obama are very real — and dangerous

In January, 11 days before his second inauguration, Donald Trump was seated next to Barack Obama at President Jimmy Carter’s funeral. In a surreal moment, the two men were laughing and chumming it up like old friends. In reality, they deeply dislike each other.

Still, Obama, as America’s first Black president, knows he must publicly wear the mask. It’s the same mask Black people, and specifically Black men, have long been forced to wear to conceal their true emotions, lest they risk being unfairly judged to be uppity, angry, hostile, difficult, not a “team player,” arrogant, aloof, dangerous, violent. 

Trump, like other powerful white men, has few if any restrictions on showing his emotions. His rage is permitted, even celebrated.

Obama’s politeness at the funeral would earn him no protection or respite from Trump and his agents. Of course, Obama knew this. He still chose to smile and laugh. Such expected social graces are one of the unique burdens of being America’s first Black president.

Now, six months after their public conversation, Trump and his agents are “flooding the zone” in a naked attempt to further distract from the growing Epstein scandal and its allegations of sexual misconduct.

And Obama is in their crosshairs.

On Tuesday, Trump claimed that Obama had committed acts of treason by supposedly “rigging” the 2016 presidential election in an effort to keep him from defeating Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. “It’s there, he’s guilty,” Trump said. “This was treason. They tried to steal the election, they tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever imagined, even in other countries.” 

Trump provided no evidence for such a strong accusation. But it did not stop there. On his Truth Social platform, Trump posted an AI-generated video of Obama being arrested in the White House and then perp-walked.

The traditional punishment for treason is execution.

In reality, then-President Obama formally accused Russia of conducting an influence operation on social media and in other spaces in support of Trump’s presidential campaign. This was largely proven to be true, including by a Republican-led Senate investigation. “We have found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling,” said then-Sen. Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which carried out the investigation. Rubio now serves as Trump’s secretary of state.

On Tuesday, Obama released a statement, remarkable in its candor condemning the behavior of a sitting president, in response to Trump’s allegations:

Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction. Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes.

The following day, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that more evidence had been discovered, supposedly implicating Obama. Later that evening, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Justice Department would be establishing a “strike force” to assess evidence of Obama’s alleged treason and what steps should be taken.

Trump’s accusations are not harmless partisanship or bluster: The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reports that from July 17 to July 20, violent threats against Obama greatly increased across some social media platforms.

Threatening one’s predecessor and other members of the opposition party with deportation, prison or worse for non-existent crimes is a defining feature of authoritarian and fascist regimes. Trump, MAGA Republicans and other agents have made similar threats against leading Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden. The president has also targeted former Rep. Liz Cheney, who served as vice-chair of the House of Representatives Jan. 6 Select Committee, along with other Republicans and principled conservatives he deems disloyal. NPR reports that, “Since 2022, when he began preparing for the presidential campaign, Trump has issued more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents.”

In an urgent essay at The American Progress, Robert Kuttner warns that, although the country has not “reached full-on fascism, yet,” we are in grave danger. “For us to survive Trump,” he writes, “the Supreme Court would have to decide that enough is enough; and Trump would have to fail in his increasingly crude efforts to pre-annul the 2026 midterm election. This may yet happen. Trump could drown in his own bile. But this descent into fascism is coming on faster and more flagrantly than almost anyone would have foreseen.”

The president’s authoritarian behavior and strongman threats against Obama are being amplified, and made more powerful and dangerous, by their racist underpinnings. Trump has been accurately described as America’s first White president. As Ta-Nehisi Coates explained in 2017:

It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a White man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of Whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it…It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is White supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power…

To Trump, Whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried Whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.

In the cosmology of Trump and the MAGA movement, Obama is more than just a former president. He is a symbol of progress along the color line — the antithesis to Trump. For Trumpism to fully cohere, Obama, and what he symbolizes, must be torn down.

Social scientists and other experts have repeatedly shown that white racial resentment, white racial animus, racism and nativism are driving factors in support for Trump and the MAGA movement. To wit: Trump’s racist “birtherism” attacks on Obama helped catapult him to leadership of the American right-wing in 2015, and then to the presidency the following year. A majority of Trump’s supporters and other Republicans also believe in the racist conspiracy theory (and lie) that white people are being “replaced” in “their own country” by Black and brown people.

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Historian Peniel Joseph has compellingly framed Trumpism and the white backlash against Obama as a contemporary version of the 19th century White supremacist “Redemption” movement — the counterrevolution that ended Reconstruction and replaced it with the White racial tyranny of the Black Codes, and Jim and Jane Crow American apartheid.

In his book “The Third Reconstruction,” Peniel writes:

Trump’s election and the rise of his MAGA movement represented a racial and political backlash deeply rooted in the history of the First Reconstruction. Trump organized America around redemption politics on an unprecedented scale, achieving a victory that removed the veneer of national consensus around rhetorical support for racial equality that had characterized the post-civil rights period. White nationalism that transcended religious affiliations, geographic diversity, and generational divisions was Trump’s métier. But Trump’s brand of populism tapped into the raw racial politics of American history…Trump targeted both President Obama and [Black Lives Matter] with a redemptionist assault on the meaning of American identity, citizenship, and democracy. The message was simple: A Black president threatened the end of the white nationalist republic that arose from Reconstruction’s ashes.

On Jan. 6, 2021, one of Trump’s MAGA foot soldiers waved a Confederate flag inside the Capitol — a victory even the Confederates never achieved during the Civil War. This was a preview of the revanchist energy that Trump’s return to power would unleash four years later in 2025.

As leading historians such as Stephen Hahn, Manisha Sinha, David Blight and others have compellingly shown, America’s slave regime, followed by Jim and Jane Crow apartheid, were the country’s native form of authoritarianism. Those systems possessed many, if not all, of the features of modern authoritarian regimes, such as widespread surveillance, mass incarceration, policing of borders and limits on travel and freedom of association, thought crimes, book bans, suppression of civil society and voting, censorship, paramilitaries, legal and extralegal violence on a massive scale, one-party rule, a system of tiered citizenship and belonging, a corrupt elite class, and systematic violations of human and civil rights. Trumpism, the larger anti-democracy movement and white restoration project are being erected on these foundations. At the same time, they are simultaneously making international connections with autocratic regimes such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

On a fundamental level, racism — and the race concept itself — are based on a system of absurdities, lies and fantasies of innate human difference based upon skin color. This is pseudoscience.

Moreover, racism in its various forms is an attempt to make a fantasy real and socially concrete. The primary goal of this system of racial hierarchy and human classification is for the in-group to naturalize and legitimize its political, social, economic and other forms of control and power (and exploitation) over various out-groups.

In all, Trump’s threats against Obama are an example of this fantasy world made dangerously real. Of course, Obama has not committed treason or some other high crime. The fantasy-lie Trump is referencing — of the “Black beast” criminal,  the usurper and “negro domination,” “the giant negro,” and imperiled and embattled whiteness — has haunted the white collective imagination for centuries. Obama’s real “crime” is symbolic: He is America’s first Black president. His literal personhood and what it symbolizes is a violation of America’s centuries-old racial order.

As they laugh at or dismiss Trump’s accusations of treason against the former president, too many members of the mainstream media, the liberal and centrist commentariat, Democrats and other establishment types are also possessed by a dangerous fantasy. Such voices believe, per the Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling on presidential immunity, that a former president cannot be charged with a crime, one real or imagined, that he committed while in office. 

This conclusion is made possible by the seductive power of white racial innocence and privilege — the same kind that also convinced many white liberals that a man like Trump, with his low values and behavior, could never be president of the United States, let alone twice. With his return to power, that white racial innocence and naivete were gravely injured, which explains why many white Americans are still shellshocked in the face of Trumpism and the larger right-wing anti-democracy movement.

As a group, Black and brown Americans — and white Americans who know the country’s real, complex history and worst tendencies — were screaming that Trump’s return to power would be a disaster. Black and brown Americans are the miners’ canaries who don’t have the luxury of collective racial innocence and privilege. Unfortunately, their warnings were not heeded.

Before he left on Friday for a trip to Scotland, Trump admitted that Obama has presidential immunity. “It probably helps him a lot…the immunity ruling,” he said. In those same remarks, Trump continued to accuse Obama of non-existent crimes.

America is increasingly no longer a country where no one is above the law, and the law is independent and separate from the will of the president. The Republican party has shown, repeatedly, that it is more loyal to Trump than to the rule of law, Constitution and nation. There were show trials in Stalin’s Russia and other authoritarian regimes. Trump, if he so desires and commands his Department of Justice to proceed, would likely get his as well. 

Even if he does not drop the mask publicly, Obama knows that Trump’s accusations of treason are no idle threat. The question now is whether he, as one of the country’s elder statesmen, will boldly stand up in defense of democracy, or let himself be symbolically pilloried — or worse.