"I don't understand how we got so toxic and just so divided and so bitter."
Barack Obama said that at a Wisconsin rally in October 2024. He seemed genuinely confused.
Let's help him remember.
It was Obama, at a 2008 campaign event, who told supporters: "I want you to argue with them and get in their face." Them was Republicans. American citizens who disagreed with him. Get in their face.
That same year, at a San Francisco fundraiser he assumed was private, Obama explained small-town voters who had lost their jobs. They "get bitter," he said. "They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Bitter. Clinging. Antipathetic to their neighbors. That's how a future president characterized rural conservatives to a roomful of coastal donors. The people he was describing didn't forget.
In 2009, as the Tea Party movement was forming — ordinary Americans showing up to town halls to ask questions about spending and the direction of the country — Obama said: "I don't want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry. I'm angry." He wasn't talking about calming anyone down. He was pouring fuel.
By 2010, the rhetoric had escalated. He told a radio audience the goal was to "punish our enemies and reward our friends" — enemies being Republican voters — while warning that his side would engage in "hand-to-hand combat" on Capitol Hill. This is the vocabulary of a man who says he can't understand how we got so toxic.
His most lasting damage wasn't any single quote. It was the frame he built around conservatives: that concerns about immigration, spending, or religious liberty weren't policy disagreements — they were fear, bitterness, and racial anxiety. Once a president set that frame, the media adopted it wholesale. A July 2016 Rasmussen poll found that 60 percent of Americans said race relations had gotten worse since Obama took office.
At the Dallas police memorial that year — held to honor five officers murdered in an ambush — Obama used the podium to deliver a lecture on systemic bias in American institutions. Five officers were being buried.
Then came the post-presidency. At John Lewis's funeral in 2020, Obama turned a eulogy into a campaign rally, comparing Republican voting laws to Jim Crow and demanding filibuster reform from the pulpit. He has spent the years since campaigning on the message that Republican voters are active dangers to the country itself.
The "no red America, no blue America" speech launched his career in 2004. It was a beautiful speech. The political operation running beneath it was something else entirely.
He knows exactly how we got here. He spent twenty years building the road.