The former president’s new memoir, Land of a Promise, will hit US bookstores just as his successor delves even further into the divide that divides his country with his stubborn insistence on power. In addition to articulating doubts and disappointments in his book, Barack Obama does not waver for a moment in his optimistic belief and idealism that progress is always possible in an ongoing great experiment called America. Not to mention the helpful warning that democracy is not inherited by the people, but must be created jointly and actively.

In recent years, Barack Obama has been careful not to speak out in public affairs, avoiding the unwritten rule that a president who resigns does not rate the work of his successor. This restraint presumably required strong determination from him, as in the four years since White left home, there had been many events on which he might have had an opinion.

Now, however, he broke the silence in style, with a promising memory of one of the year’s book sensations. What’s more, the former president (and his publisher) also intervened by not requesting the book before the presidential elections, like Mary Trump or John Bolton, but when the contest ended, although one of the protagonists still stubbornly ignores it.

It will be published in the United States on November 17 and in Hungary on December 10 by HVG Books. A promised land (A promised land) can also be an instructive reflection of what makes a president president. The contrast is hard to follow: While Donald Trump tries to convey his thoughts to the public in posts of up to 280 characters on Twitter, Barack Obama remembers his presidency in a book of more than 700 pages, and this is only the first volume of the first campaigns. even Osama covers the Obama era to the action against bin Laden.

Barack Obama began writing the book shortly after saying goodbye in 2017 and finished the job in late summer 2020, the crux of the presidential campaign.

the In the land of a promise Obama is not only focusing on his own presidential struggles, but he is also trying to uncover the most important connections, understand what is happening in the country where he has been president for eight years and how the United States got there, that a resigning president and future president cannot speak. be understood, endangering American citizens in various ways.

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And the former president, who in 2008 a hope and the change With his promise, he moved into the White House, also facing how his own entry on stage set in motion the processes that led to Donald Trump being able to take the stage in 2016 and not wanting to resign after a lost race. “It is as if my mere presence in the White House was enough to cause them a deep panic and feel that the order of nature was altered,” writes the first and last black president of the United States, who could not help but notice that by politicizing to Republicans it became increasingly central to the fact that the visceral emotional reaction to his presidency overwritten any political or ideological differences.

That is exactly what Donald Trump understood, which is why he started to spread that I was not even born in the United States, which would have meant that he had illegally held the presidency. With this, the cured remedy offered to millions of American citizens has sparked anxiety over racial prejudice, filled with the horror of a black man sitting in the White House.

Obama is also trying to understand how, as he writes, the dark forces that have long lurked on the fringes of the modern Republican Party – xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, dislike for blacks and browns – have found their way. way to the greats. (She identifies an important milestone in her nomination of Sarah Palin as vice president.)

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While the American press began to muffle Donald Trump’s great sayings with a sharp delay in the post-election phase, Obama casts his eyes that years ago “not once did they say a round pretzel that Trump is lying and that the The conspiracy theory he’s spreading is racist. ” In return, “the more attention the media paid to their statements, the more informative value they were given.”

In the book, Obama also recalls an episode in his presidency when he managed to neutralize these dark forces with the power of jokes at a 2011 dinner at the Washington Hilton honoring white domestic correspondents, where the president traditionally gives a standing-up speech. . (That was the night, by the way, when the Navy’s specially trained SEAL commandos prepared to assault Osama bin Laden.)

“I took a short break midway through and turned to Trump. “I know not all of your calculations came in at this point,” I said, “but no one is happier than Donald than the fact that we have ended the debate about my birth. Now you can finally tackle the really important issues. Was lodging forged on the moon? What really happened in Roswell? Where did Biggie and Tupac go? (…) The audience chuckled as Trump laughed, while Trump sat in his place with a silent, weak and not very sincere smile.

All Obama knew at the time was that Trump was a separate program that

launched a product that, as useless as it was, continued to grow in demand day by day. The same reporters who are laughing at it now will appear on your shows later. Editors will compete to see who is sitting at their table. Rather than being exiled from the media for his conspiracy theories from the air, he only received even more attention.

However, Obama writes of the memoirs about his relationship not only with his successor but also with his predecessor, which again only provides an interesting background to the current White House stalemate. Remember, for example, that President George W. Bush did everything he could to make sure things went well in the transfer “either out of respect for the position, because of what he learned from his father, or because of bad memories of his own arrival (some members of the Clinton apparatus allegedly removed the W keys from the computer keyboard before exiting) or simply out of basic decency. ” “I promised that when the time came, I would do the same for my successor,” he writes, and presumably Donald Trump would have to prove it: Obama welcomed him to the White House shortly after his election.

In a series of interviews related to the book, Barack Obama elegantly but firmly expresses his views on the successor’s unfounded attachment to power. When the 60 minutes When asked about Trump’s behavior, Obama said: “Well, the president is a public official. He occupies the office temporarily, this is how it is planned from the beginning. And when that deadline has expired, it’s your job to put the country’s interests first and transcend your own ego, your own interests, your own frustration. ” It’s still unclear how much Obama’s advice is worth to Trump that if he wants to be remembered for putting the country’s interests first, he should do the same now.

The memoirs were not written by the former president for personal purposes. As he wrote,

Now that there is such tremendous turmoil in America, my thoughts in the book can show us how to heal our country from division and make our democracy work for everyone. This task cannot be tied to any president, but depends on all of us, all committed citizens.



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