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Obama Made Dark Joke That Trump's Support with Whites Was Like How Some Black People Felt About O.J.: Book
Barack Obama once mordantly quipped that Donald Trump's appeal to white Americans was similar to the way Black Americans showed support for O.J. Simpson during his 1990s murder trial and subsequent acquittal, according to a new book by a former aide.
"Trump is for a lot of white people what O.J.'s acquittal was to a lot of Black folksโyou know it's wrong, but it feels good," Obama's former speechwriter and national security adviser Ben Rhodes recalls him saying in After the Fall, published this week.
At the time of Simpson's trial in early 1995, about 22 percent of Black Americans believed the former NFL star was guilty of killing wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. That was compared to 63 percent of white Americans who believed he was guilty.
Although in recent years polling shows both Black and white Americans similarly believe Simpson, now 73, is guilty โ he was found liable in a civil trial after he was acquitted, though he continues to protest his innocence โ the differing opinions at the time of the trial were widely viewed through the lens of the country's racial divide.
Rhodes writes in his new book that Obama, 59, made the comparison between Simpson and Trump, 74, out of a place of "dark humor."
"Trump was a lightning rod," Rhodes writes. "But focusing on him avoided plumbing the depths underneath, the currents that shaped our country. Obama's frustration was more likely to come out indark humor."
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/obama-made-dark-joke-trumps-184144251.html