Why Did Trump's Supporters Take Barack Obama's Mandela Lecture Personally?

Barack Obama, WH Photo

As I commented in several recent posts, what we don't say can be as important as what we do say. In this case, former President Barack Obama criticized liars, evil dictators, and oppressive forces, which led supporters and opponents alike to assume that he was talking about President Donald Trump. Why?

Obama gave the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture on June 17. Although it was a very good speech, Obama said nothing that was surprising or unusual. He praised Nelson Mandela and various South African leaders. He told a few self-deprecating jokes about the weather. He talked about the history of oppression, including worldwide slavery and American Jim Crow laws. He reminded the audience that, not too many years ago, "Privilege and status was rigidly bound by caste and color and ethnicity and religion. And even in my own country, even in democracies like the United States, founded on a declaration that all men are created equal, racial segregation and systemic discrimination was the law in almost half the country and the norm throughout the rest of the country." He discussed the march of human freedom during the late 20th century.

Obama also noted, however, "the failures of governments and powerful elites to squarely address the shortcomings and contradictions of this international order that we now see much of the world threatening to return to an older, a more dangerous, a more brutal way of doing business." He continued that, "It is a plain fact that racial discrimination still exists in both the United States and South Africa."

Some of those points might disturb a conservative, but it was all utterly and inarguably true.

In the wake of inequality and social disruptions, however, Obama complained that "a politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment began to appear, and that kind of politics is now on the move." He noted that "strongman politics" were spreading. He noted that, in the Western democracies, "you've got far-right parties that oftentimes are based not just on platforms of protectionism and closed borders, but also on barely hidden racial nationalism."

Not surprisingly, the press considered that the last comment was directed against President Donald Trump. An article in The New Yorker called the Obama speech an attack on Trump, although Obama never mentioned Trump's name.

While much of the right-wing media ignored Obama's speech, the conservative Weekly Standard asked, rather preposterously, whether "Could it be that the current president’s wild, fragmentary semi-coherent gibe-and-insult collections—that is, his routine campaign talks—sounded somehow refreshing after eight years of Barack Obama’s measured and rhythmic platitudes?"

In my social media feed, conservatives have complained that it was wrong for Obama to attack Trump from another nation - although, unless they felt guilty, there is no reason for them to think that Obama was talking about Trump, was there? 

But why would anybody think this was about Trump – unless they knew perfectly well that Trump's behavior has been in the wrong?

There is a long history of great speeches that attack people without ever mentioning them. Most famously, Margaret Chase Smith attacked Joseph McCarthy that way. These speeches work because everyone knows that something is morally wrong – but the only way to cast light on the problem is for someone to have the courage and ethos to stand up and protest against evil. If the shoes fits – people figure it out – and the speech is all the more powerful because the protest is veiled. Speeches like Obama's work only because everyone knows that something is wrong, while everyone was waiting for someone else to put a stop to it.