Trump’s America Involves ‘the Same Arguments’ as the Historical Period That Gave Birth to the Klan, Barack Obama Says
Tyler O’Neil
• July 26, 2026
Former President Barack Obama recently gave America another reminder of how his presidency—once expected to bring the country together—left us more divided on race.
Obama compared America under President Donald Trump to the tumultuous period after the Civil War that gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan. He said the U.S. is “having the same arguments” we did in the 1860s and 1870s, when Union troops occupied the former Confederacy and attempted to secure real freedom for former slaves.
“These issues are still here,” Obama told author Malcolm Gladwell in an interview for the podcast “Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise.”
“How are we going to help the freed people who’ve been enslaved?” he asked. “What are we going to give them to allow them to have a go at life? You trace that debate, of ’40 acres and a mule’ and public education, and you can trace it all the way through to debates about welfare, and debates about now DEI, and do we as a society have an obligation to address past injustices that have been institutionalized or left a legacy of poverty? We’re having that argument.”
Obama didn’t stop there. “You got a Supreme Court that has systematically weakened the possibilities of enforcing voting rights in our democracy,” he said. “And we have a politics now that, at least one of our major parties has been captured by a politics that is not that subtle about suggesting that ‘we the people’ means a certain kind of people.”
He attacked Vice President JD Vance, claiming Vance gave “a speech that is basically a ‘blood and soil’ version of ‘we, the people,’ that it matters who your parents were, how long they’ve been here, despite him being married to the daughter of an immigrant himself.”
“That goes back to ideas about who gets to be a citizen, who belongs,” Obama added.
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