Barack Obama once privately said “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” according to former speechwriter Ben Rhodes’s upcoming book “After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made”, the Independent reported Wednesday, adding that “Mr Rhodes characterizes the OJ remark as ‘black humor'”.
What’s funny about this is it is essentially almost exactly what a Trump fan wrote to Politico editor John Harris in December 2019, when Harris asked MAGA readers to email him to explain why they opposed impeaching Donald for the Ukraine-Hunter Biden bullshit but why they would also be 100% against it if the circumstances were exactly the same with Hillary Clinton as president. The followup lowlight reel of the reader mail was literally titled “He Is Our O.J.” from that one response:
“With sincerity, candor and even a measure of wistful idealism, people shared their views of a political and media culture they believe is cynical at its core. If almost nothing is on the level, almost anything goes. For Keith Swartz, who is 66 years old and runs a recruiting firm based in Tacoma, Washington, almost anything includes a president he regards as ‘manic, uneducated, illogical,’ and also ‘essentially a horrible person… vulgar, amoral, narcissistic.’ Wait, this a defense of Trump? Yes, hang on. ‘He’s done a fine job on the economy, in particular, in the face of a Democratic opposition that has bent rules and abused process for three years in an implacable bid to thwart him. To those of us who support what he has accomplished… it feels like he is our O.J.’“
Parallels aside, there is the one pretty big real-life link between Trump and OJ – that Dersh defended both of them in their biggest trials. Around that time I asked on The Hill a few times some version of “Trump fans, why do you guys constantly panic about a supposed epidemic of Black-on-white crime and then turn around and root for a guy who got a Black man acquitted for the murder of two white people that he definitely committed?” and the closet I got to an actual material response was a “Everyone’s entitled to a defense” from one of the MAGA trolls there. So obviously they didn’t like Dersh being there, but they didn’t want to admit it to me.