Is Trump's rhetoric rooted in America's reaction to Obama?

Former US President Barack Obama has attacked the Trump administration over the Iran war high consumer prices as he hit the campaign trail for the Democrats ahead of the US midterm election. Speaking from Ohio, President Obama criticized Donald Trump's record in office. After two years of chaos and cruelty and corruption and incompetence, the likes of which we have not seen in modern times, you get a chance to say enough's enough. We are voting for change. The former president also criticised Trump's taste in home decor. Does anybody think this guy in the White House right now is spending all that time thinking about these issues? I mean, I don't know if you've noticed, but he seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV. Guys building a ballroom that's bigger than the White House. It's paved over the Rose Garden, put a helicopter pad on the South Lawn, and there's gold everywhere. What's up with the gold? Everything, more gold. He's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a cheesecake factory. The current incumbent, President Trump, hit back. Remember when Barack Hussein Obama used to say that there'll be no manufacturing? He said, we're not a manufacturer. so he was wrong because of our economic policy tariffs which again are bringing in massive companies i don't want to mention Audi but without tariffs they would not have been coming in you don't have to nobody wants to well he's going to that's true actually he wants to be everyone wants me without tariffs they're not here without tariffs we have 2.2 trillion dollars and now he's making a speech for Muhammad today in a massive crowd a massive crowd has shown up where are they they never talk about my crowd Nina Burley is investigative journalist and author of the American Freak Show substack and joins me now um well i mean clearly it's all gearing up ahead of the midterm elections what do you think of the intervention from president obama does he still have the clout that he once did when he was first elected i do think that uh you know obama is enormously um popular obviously with the democrats in this country i mean he he's the last sort of great speaker and um in in his own way you know a big uniter for the democrats and you can see yesterday in ohio he was um stumping for the um the senate candidate and the governor uh the gubernatorial candidate and uh he filled the stadium it's a 10 000 person stadium and i think there were just, you know, people to the rafters. And meanwhile, Trump's appearances over there are they're under attended. They're they're choosing smaller venues so that the TV cameras can't pan and see the empty seats. And even with that, I think the last stadium had seating for 4000 and only 3000 showed up and they had to cover empty seats with tarps. So nothing makes Donald Trump matter than that um and i think what you're seeing today of course is you know obama obama said that about the um the cheesecake factory and the and the leaf and and i don't know if your listeners know what the Cheesecake Factory is i don't have um enough knowledge of of um you know restaurants in in the UK to give you an analogy but you know it's a low-brow chain restaurant um that uh you know she serves cheesecake and um so the response from the left or sorry from the right this morning is oh well you know this is exactly why Trump got elected in 2016 because the Democrats have put you know put this this um you know supposed populist and you know brown populist in the White House for two uh two uh terms and you know he's never even stepped foot in a cheesecake factory and it's a working class restaurant and you know he's this elite you know an elite spokesman for the elites and and that you know that's what they'll throw it that's what they throw at Obama and so you know it's just rhetorical silliness going on meanwhile um you know we're coming up on on you know it's a very tense time for the for both sides really but especially for the Republicans because um you know as much as they want to say these polls are fake every single poll is showing um you know a tsunami of um of disaster for them yes and this is because currently the Republicans control the Senate and the House of Representatives they control both houses of Congress to remind people and this crucial vote that's on the third of November so just a couple of weeks or just a week away i should say um it looks like certainly the Senate if i'm right if not the House will go to the Democrats and what the current polls are showing uh yeah i mean yes i think i i thought it was the other way around the way around right yeah i mean the Senate, the House is definitely going I think the senate is trickier um but it it's it's close i mean there it looks like they might even get a democratic senator out of texas which is yeah just unheard of for you know since since blue dog democrat since the yellow what do they call them that the democrats of of before uh lbj and kennedy that they just don't they don't vote for democrats down there um so you know there's kind of a sea change underway and i think the um the panic that you see on the right is um that you know trump goes out and gives these speeches and um you know there is a sense among you know american voters that you know the economy's messed up that especially obviously with the gas prices people here are you know big drivers and they're they're beside themselves i mean you go there's some states at six dollars a gallon um it's just unbelievable and so um what you hear trump doing is saying well you know belittling that problem i mean that was one of the things he did yesterday with this baby voice oh you know you whittle whiners and and meanwhile you know we are making so much freaking money and he starts talking about how much money the oil and gas industry is making on oil and gas right now as if that's something that people here in this country would be cheering about. And his staff, I think, there's reporting today that they're just beside themselves because he can't be controlled. He says what he wants. He says these things and they just come off so tone deaf. And I just wanted to add, he talked about the trillions coming in for manufacturing. And that actually is a completely debunked number. It's debunked by ap news bloomberg economics you know political uh fact checking it's not true that that that kind of money has come in what's going on is they're getting these um you know pledges um they're non-binding foreign promises from like UAE and Qatar that uh that you know they would put money into this country and the the money that Trump is talking about would actually exceed UAE's and Qatar's sovereign wealth funds so it's like not even realistic but you know he throws these numbers around and he throws these but the main thing that's going on here is that uh and unfortunately it's very ugly it's it's the um it's the race baiting that's happening where his speech is always well i was going to ask you about that i mean in this particular speech he he talks about a word i can't say but some house countries um in particular as well and says um why do we always take people from these countries and and says from Yemen Libya Haiti and Somalia why can't we take people from Norway Sweden or Denmark to paraphrase him yeah i mean yeah it's pretty overt it's overt racism and so that is that it sort of adds to the picture of what's going on here when Obama shows up he's brown obviously um his middle name is Hussein which they can't they will not say his name without mentioning the Muslim name which they're also doing with the Senate candidate in Michigan um who's extremely popular this is just this is Abdel El Sayed who and Trump was just calling him Muhammad, doesn't he? Yes because that's his middle name and now you see you know when people interview his people, they're all like, well he's hiding his middle name and it's like, well what's the middle name of the guy who's running against him? Do you guys really care about middle names? Very fair point, but you know why they're doing it but the, but the thing about, especially with the Somalis, that's been going on here for a long time because they're really settled into Minneapolis, which is a Democrat-controlled city and state. And, you know, they've pumped up this story about, you know, kind of a social services grifting scam that some Somalis were involved in there as an example of how, you know, these brown people are coming here and they're stealing your tax money and in fact the person who went to jail for that scam is a white female, but the whole point of this is to, you know, again you're going back to Obama and Obama you know 2016 election Trump wins Obama has been president for two terms in this country we've had this brown president and then the shock of having suddenly oh this almost out racist which he is now actually an out racist the way he's talking and what you see is um you know they like to call the liberals they're suffering from Trump derangement syndrome that's a thing TDS you've got TDS and actually what's going on here is um you know this country has been suffering from Obama derangement syndrome for a long time you see that you see that ODS you see that in the in the way that he talks about brown people and the way that people that his you know i think it's a minority of americans respond to that um that you know a lot of people have never gotten over the election of a very competent brown person to the White House even and a very popular brown person and so um you know unfortunately this country is still dealing with um you know the struggling with the um the dregs of um of this really abominable um instinct that that's been here you know been you've been sort of under uh you know it's it went underground you know in the generation after i guess uh you know the Kennedy and and the Great Society and so on where you did you know have welfare and black the black people began to get a little bit more um you know that some fairness was pushed into the system and so that you know where i mean i mean the the poverty in this country for black people before Kennedy you know when Kennedy was president in the 60s the before they had this Great Society thing it was incredible i mean it was like the South was like you know they had maternal um death rate that were like Africa and and you know diseases that you only see in like you know Africa and it was this country that you know they pulled that they pulled together you know and and change things and then of course you had DEI and you have you know this effort to sort of balance things out a little bit um balancing out institutional and historic racism and and there is a minority of people who are supporting Trump well who are very responsive to that and we've seen those debates come over here as well