Here he goes again. The self-deluding Barack Obama hit a new low last week when he tried to absolve his presidency of any responsibility for the deep divisions in America that led to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Instead, Obama blamed President Donald Trump.

“Those extreme views were not in my White House,” Obama claimed in remarks to the Jefferson Society. “I wasn’t empowering them. I wasn’t putting the weight of the United States government behind them. When we have the weight of the United States government behind extremist views, we’ve got a problem.”

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Either I’ve misremembered Obama’s two terms in the Oval Office, or he’s delusional.

Beginning with a 2010 Univision interview, in which he urged Hispanics to “punish our enemies” in the midterm elections, Obama started dividing Americans into friends and foes. Obama was the first modern president to rally voters against the opposing party by calling them “enemies.” That kind of divisive rhetoric hadn’t been used since the Civil War. In the Univision interview, Obama said publicly what he’d been saying privately for over a year. In the spring of 2009, the populist tea party movement sprang up in response to the Federal Reserve’s bailouts of Wall Street, while Main Street businesses went under and millions of Americans lost their homes.

Its supporters were largely the class of Americans Obama belittled at a San Francisco fundraiser as “bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment.” Primed by his own prejudices to see these fellow Americans as a political threat, Obama went on offense. His strategy was to use the media to smear tea party patriots as bigots. Obama directed White House aides to put the word out to legacy media that the movement was motivated not by the individual liberty, pro-market, and small government principles it proclaimed but by racism, pure and simple.

Suddenly, millions of Americans found themselves labeled as racist enemies of the Obama White House. Soon thereafter, the tea party was under scrutiny by the IRS. Lois Lerner, head of the tax agency’s Exempt Organizations Unit, oversaw the denial of tax-exempt status to tea party-affiliated groups and demands for lists of donors. In congressional testimony, Lerner pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating herself and was censured by Congress as a result.

In his memoir A Promised Land, Obama reveals how his hatred of the tea party morphed into his belief that Republicans were the “enemy.” He attacked Sarah Palin, the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate and subsequent leader of the tea party movement. “Through Palin,” Obama wrote, “it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party — xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks — were finding their way to center stage.”

Victor Davis Hanson was on to Obama’s game years earlier. In a January 2012 CBS News column titled “Barack Obama’s Most Disturbing Legacy,” he chronicled Obama’s propensity for dividing Americans by race and ethnicity. He termed it “racial tribalism.” Hanson explained the political calculus behind Obama’s racial tactics.

“Any short-term damage incurred by engaging in racial tribalism can easily be later erased by soaring teleprompted speeches on racial harmony; the media will either not widely report his emphases on race or generally support his charges; a person of color can hardly be culpable of racial polarization himself given the history of racial discrimination in this country,” Hansen wrote.

“There will be many legacies of Barack Obama,” Hansen concluded. “Racial divisiveness is proving the most disturbing.”

Hansen’s prediction of polarization was prescient. In January 2017, Gallup released a poll headlined “Obama Job Approval Ratings Most Politically Polarized By Far.” Under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, polarization was minimal. It began its climb during George W. Bush’s presidency and then soared under Obama to a 70% gap between Democrats and Republicans. 

Obama’s worldview that Republicans, especially white Republicans, were “enemies” and all opponents racists and bigots drove polarization to extremes. In his second term, he harped on race. 

“Racism, we are not cured of,” Obama said on a 2015 podcast with comedian Marc Maron, “and it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘n*****’ in public. That’s not a measure of whether racism still exists or not. Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”

Obama foreshadowed Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo’s critique of America as systemically racist. This was pure critical race theory, a harbinger of the CRT and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that relied on a concept psychologists term “splitting,” in which the world is divided into moral absolutes like oppressors and the oppressed, or anti-racists and racists, with no shades of gray.

Splitting, psychologists tell us, is an ego-defense that helps people cling to a rigid belief system, aka political ideology, when confronted with facts that don’t fit into their orthodoxy. The conscious self safeguards the ego’s belief system from challenge, but the unconscious self realizes the difference between belief and reality. 

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Self-deception results as a related ego-defense mechanism.

With some people, the self-delusion is so extreme that they can lie, believing at a conscious level that they’re telling the truth. That’s why Obama maintains with a straight face that he and his White House were not extremist when the facts plainly present otherwise.

John B. Roberts II served in the Reagan White House and was an international political strategist and executive producer of the McLaughlin Group. His latest book is Reagan’s Cowboys: Inside the 1984 Reelection Campaign’s Secret Operation Against Geraldine Ferraro.