I read an article a few days ago (unfortunately, I can’t place it) in which a former Obama staffer said that the anti-establishment messages of Obama and Trump, if you stripped out the latter’s racism and “America First” rhetoric, were similar. Was he right?
No. Obama had plenty of support from leaders of the Democratic establishment during the 2008 campaign, and he never attacked them. His campaign wasn’t an insurgency as much as a promise to get past Hillary’s perceived divisiveness and heal the country’s partisan wounds. Even he would concede that his efforts along those lines were a miserable failure, because it turned out that Hillary was not really exceptional, after all; the GOP views all Democratic victories as illegitimate, because Democratic voters aren’t real Americans.