Cont.
It is worth noting that Trump has also
criticized America—he referred to “American carnage” in our streets, rejected American exceptionalism (something Limbaugh falsely
claimed Obama did many
times), called America a “laughingstock,” and defended Putin’s murders by
saying: “What, you think our country is so innocent?”
Yet Limbaugh never denounced Trump as an America-hater. The host did, however,
saythat Obama was “our first anti-American president,”
that he “hates America,” “doesn’t
like much of what’s American,”
sees “this country as a great Satan,” and
believes “by virtue of its character, America was evil.” And that’s just from one particularly bile-filled 11-week stretch in 2010.
In order to further establish Obama’s supposed anti-Americanism, Limbaugh said that the president rejected the original principles of our country, as well as the Constitution itself, and the [white] men who crafted it. “Obama talks about ‘remaking’ America [which] means destroying these traditions, institutions that have defined America and its greatness since the founding,” the host
stated on July 3, 2009. He
added on December 15, 2009, that the president was not proud of our country: “America as talked about by Barack Obama—is an America of guilt ... guilty of racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, discrimination, imperialism, colonialism.” Two years to the day later, Limbaugh
asserted that Obama believed America was “criminal.” The host also
said on December 30, 2011, that the president considered America to be “exceptionally evil.” For good measure, he included
Michelle Obama as well,
citing her “bilious disgust with America” on October 31, 2011.
Perhaps most explosively, Limbaugh
askedin March 2011 if the military had a “contingency plan for—I don’t want to say an anti-American president, ‘cause that’s gonna cloud my real intent here.” After being criticized for appearing to call for a military coup, the host fell back on his usual shtick, that this “was a media tweak ... That’s what’s called stirring the excrement.”
Even when discussing proposals that did not obviously relate to race, Limbaugh repeatedly characterized Obama and Democrats as favoring Americans of color over whites. For example, on February 22, 2009, just before Obamacare passed, he
characterized it as “a civil rights bill. This is reparations.” On July 20, 2010, Limbaugh
warned that, under Obamacare, “minorities” in “the federal bureaucracy” serving a black president could decide whether “the rest of us” live or die. Expanding his policy horizons, on July 22, 2009, the host
declared: “Obama’s entire economic program is reparations!”
The language Limbaugh used when the topic was Black Lives Matter or immigration was just as racist. On the latter, more than a week of attacks on Obama over the violent death of Kathryn Steinle culminated in a diatribe on July 15, 2015, in which Limbaugh
juxtaposed Obama not reaching out to her family while instead having written to four dozen felons he had set free by commuting their sentences, and connecting with Michael Brown’s family in Ferguson, Missouri. Limbaugh’s point was to remind his listeners that Obama cared more about prisoners (read: black and Latino people) and black people killed by cops than a white woman who was murdered by someone here illegally.
As America moved into the party conventions in the summer of 2016, Limbaugh declared on July 12 that Hillary and Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama all
believed “there’s nothing redeemable about that America. It has to be ‘transformed,’ I think is the word Obama uses.” Later in that same broadcast, he stated that, “Obama stands with people he thinks have been given the shaft ever since this country was founded. I think his objective is to even the playing field, as he defines it. And the way he does it is to transfer discrimination from one group to the next, rather than end it. His prescription is payback.” This is how you convince Republicans that the Democratic Party has it in for whites.
On July 28, after Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention—a speech that soared with positive language about our country, including the words “America is already great”—Limbaugh
dismissed those words as insincere: “That’s not Barack Obama. That’s not what he believes. That’s not who he is ... Obama is the guy who thinks America’s founding was unjust and immoral. He doesn’t relish it. He doesn’t cherish it.”
Hearing this for eight years certainly helped convince Republicans that Democrats prioritize the interests of minorities over whites and, by extension, that only Republicans would protect white interests. By further defining America as essentially equivalent to white America, Limbaugh made clear that anyone who “hates America” hates whites.
This context is vital to understanding why Trump lied about The Squad supposedly hating America. In this, as in his broader rhetoric on immigration and, in fact, in the way he defines Americanness, Trump is following the trail blazed by right-wing media figures, and none more so than Rush Limbaugh.
Since the day he descended on that escalator at Trump Tower, the racist-in-chief has been speaking the language of racially resentful and alienated whites, language Limbaugh broadcasted to millions of Americans five days a week after Barack Obama became president in 2009. Trump presented himself as the champion of those white people in the struggle against their enemies, people like President Obama and other liberals, as well as those whom liberals championed—particularly Americans of color and immigrants.
Trump’s road to the White House was significantly smoother than it would otherwise have been because Limbaugh had already paved the way for him. Going forward, the clash between the Obama and Limbaugh/Trump definitions of Americanness—exemplified by President Individual 1’s most recent attacks on Ilhan Omar and the rest of The Squad—will remain central to our public discourse for the foreseeable future.