The Mysterious Obsession With Obama’s Fake Son

Barnett’s hypothesizing about the motives of a nonexistent male child of Barack Obama is part of a conservative fixation that’s detached from historical reality. Yet it feeds a collective sense of victimization that Trump shares and has deftly exploited.[Graeme Wood: The most frightening shooters are the smart ones]The reference, for those who don’t closely follow conservative news sources, was to a line Obama uttered in 2012. After Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, Black leaders criticized the president for failing to speak out. Obama, appearing in the Rose Garden, said, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”Ever since, the political right has turned the phrase into a notorious synecdoche for the Obama presidency. Conservatives continue to repeat the line, years later, which is why Barnett was able to reference it as shorthand. For some on the right, Obama’s remark is the most emblematic moment of his presidency, hauled out again and again by Fox News, Breitbart, and other right-leaning news outlets to remind them of his responsibility for racial strife.As Ben Shapiro put it last year on Ezra Klein’s podcast, “The implicit promise of Barack Obama was the worst conflict in the history of America—which is the racial history of the United States, which is truly horrifying. That in his person, he was basically going to be the capstone of the great movement toward Martin Luther King’s dream. And when, instead, things seemed to move in the opposite direction, which was: Well, you know, it turns out that Black people in America, they’re inherently victimized