A recent New York Times article reported that President Donald Trump, in a meeting this past March, suggested a moat filled with snakes or alligators to fortify his long-sought wall at the southern border.
While many Americans thought the ridiculous and cruel idea was beyond imagination, it turns out Trump's predecessor, former President Barack Obama, was more prescient than most.
While campaigning for his second term—back in the days where a giant wall stretching across the southern border was laughable—Obama joked that Republicans would want a moat with alligators.
Watch below.
It only took eight years for one President's joke to become an inferior President's serious suggestion. Some jokingly suggested that Trump actually got the idea from Obama's speech.
Others couldn't believe the timeline we've found ourselves in.
If the idea wasn't already laughable enough when Obama joked about it, political comedian Stephen Colbert suggested—satirically—a moat filled with alligators in 2006, five years before Obama and 13 years before Donald Trump.
Trump has spent much of his legacy trying to undo Obama's achievements, so it's surprising that he would heed one of Obama's suggestion—even if that suggestion was noting the Republican party's belligerence toward immigrants and refugees.
What a world.
The book The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment, available here, explores how mirroring the KKK’s tactics, "Donald Trump delivered a message that mingled economic populism with deep cultural resentments" in the wake of a minority President. The authors present a sociological analysis of White supremacist resurgence that "goes beyond Trump the individual to show how his rise to power was made possible by a convergence of circumstances. White Americans’ experience of declining privilege and perceptions of lost power can trigger a political backlash that overtly asserts White-nationalist goals.
