President Barack Obama is releasing a new 768-page memoir titled, “A Promised Land” on Nov. 17 and readers can expect insight regarding the future president’s childhood and political rise, as well as the 2008 battle for the White House that included vehement “birther” movement attacks by then-reality star Donald J. Trump.
The memoir will dive into Obama’s historic first four years in office with hundreds of pages dedicated to the fights and characters that colored his tenure in the White House, according to CNN. Among his recounts: the racial inequality that plagued the nation and brought rise to Trumpism.
“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted,” Obama wrote. “Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”
In addition to Trump, Obama’s memoir also captures the timeframe surrounding the capture and kill of Osama bin Laden.
In the memoir, Obama refers to his “failure” to pass immigration reform as being “a bitter pill to swallow” and acknowledging that the economy “stank” as he headed into the 2010 midterms, where Republicans reclaimed the House of Representatives on the back of the Tea Party movement.
“As far as I was concerned, the election didn’t prove our agenda had been wrong,” Obama writes of 2010. “It just proved that… I’d failed to rally the nation, as FDR had once done, behind what I knew to be right. Which to me was just as damning.”
This is Obama’s third memoir — the first was “Dream from My Father” in 1995 and his second was “The Audacity of Hope” in 2006. Michelle Obama released her own memoir, “Becoming,” in 2018, selling millions of copies.