Barack Obama allegedly joked that white people were down with the Trump administration just as hard as Black folks supported O.J. Simpson’s acquittal in his ex-wife’s killing.
Obama’s former speechwriter Ben Rhodes recalls in his latest book, “After the Fall,” that Obama compared the controversial Simpson murder trial to Donald Trump’s base.
“Trump is for a lot of white people what OJ’s acquittal was to a lot of Black folks — you know it’s wrong, but it feels good,” Obama allegedly said in an undated quote published by the New York Times on Tuesday.
Simpson’s murder case became a national obsession and was dubbed the “trial of the century.” He was acquitted by a jury in 1995 in the double murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman. The verdict came three years after the LA riots in 1992, which disrupted the city for five days when a jury acquitted four members of the LAPD charged with using excessive force in the arrest of Rodney King. His vicious beating by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department was videotaped and broadcast nationally.
Initial polling showed 70 percent of Black people agreed with the Simpson acquittal while 75 percent of white people disagreed with the jury’s decision, according to the Daily Mail.
A civil court awarded the families of the victims a $33.5 million judgment against Simpson in 1997 for the wrongful deaths of Goldman and his ex-wife. The NFL star had some of his property seized and auctioned but according to reports, most of the judgment remains unpaid.
Simpson was released from prison in October 2017 after serving nine years for a robbery-kidnapping conviction in Las Vegas. As theGRIO reported, he continues to believe his conviction and sentence for trying to steal back his own memorabilia were unfair.
After his football career, Simpson became a commercial pitchman, actor and football commentator. He was once a multimillionaire but he previously said most of his fortune was spent defending himself after he was charged with the murders.
Rhodes, who worked for Obama from 2009 to 2017, draws on his experience in the White House for his new book, in which he explores race relations in the US and global injustice. He also compares both the Obama and the Trump administrations to authoritarian regimes in Hungary, Russia, and China, according to the report.
“America had helped shape the world we lived in before descending into the cesspool of the Trump years,” Rhodes asserted, as reported by the Daily Mail.
“We now had a government that was busy radicalizing a huge swath of American society, with pockets of the country turning to violent white supremacy or a QAnon conspiracy theory positing that America is secretly run by a cabal of child sex traffickers.”
Rhodes previously wrote a memoir about his time with the Obama White House, titled “The World as It Is.”
In his new book “Battle for the Soul,” Edward-Isaac Dovere says that Obama referred to Trump as a “racist” a “sexist” a “lunatic” and a “corrupt motherf****r.”
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