The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper rewrote history on Tuesday as he welcomed The Atlantic staff writer Thomas Chatterton Williams to Comedy Central to promote his new book. According to Klepper, it was conservative media that insisted on making Barack Obama “the black president,” not liberals who insisted that disagreeing with Obama was racist.
Klepper began by summarizing the book, “You look specifically at the summer of 2020, but this book takes us back a little bit, about the promise of Barack Obama. And talks about this promise of post-racialism and how you can draw a direct line from that to this era of Trump and MAGA. Explain that for me a little bit.”
Williams responded, “Yeah, I think we had a moment in the beginning of this century when the country seemed to come -- not everyone in the country -- but a plurality of people in the country, maybe even a slim majority of people in the country, really wanted to put the past oppressions and biases behind us and create this multiethnic society that Barack Obama's figure kind of gave us a hint of what could be. There was a moment when people seemed to want to transcend the kind of conflicts we had been plagued with in the previous century, and Barack Obama's figure was a special, charismatic kind of idea of a post-racial future embodied in the president. And I think that we had a chance. But it didn't last so long.”
It was then that Klepper caused many heads to be scratched, “I feel like he had an entire media ecosystem on the right that was making Barack Obama the black president. That was consistently predicting this, and so in some ways, it felt like this moment was a necessary moment of inclusion. He didn't bring up identity, and identity was somewhat thrust on him as a weapon.”
Obama was the most liberal president in American history. His ideas were extremely controversial, but it was liberals who used race to try to shut down the conversation. It was Joe Biden, his own vice president, that said Mitt Romney, now considered by many Democrats to be one of the “good” Republicans, wanted to put black people back in chains.
As it was, Williams replied, “Well, it shows how little leeway he had and how there was no room for any mishap, and that’s what I think is a tragedy of his presidency, actually. It was always too much for one person to ever be able to handle because the moment anybody could kind of put a misstep on you, then it was much more extreme and much more significant than it would have been for another president.”
Williams can be an interesting guy. On one hand, he considers himself to be a liberal, but, on the other, he is willing to contradict the left on some things, especially identity politics. He recently wrote an article claiming Zohran Mamdani identifying as an African-American shows the absurdity of box-checking affirmative action and later told Klepper that focusing on someone’s race hinders our ability to understand them as individuals because racial groups are not monoliths.
So, yes, Obama was a tragic president, just in a different way. His policies were not good, but it was hard to have a conversation about them because the left insisted that opposition to the policies was opposition to his race.
Here is a transcript for the July 15 show:
Comedy Central The Daily Show
7/15/2025
11:31 PM ET
JORDAN KLEPPER: You look specifically at the summer of 2020, but this book takes us back a little bit, about the promise of Barack Obama. And talks about this promise of post-racialism and how you can draw a direct line from that to this era of Trump and MAGA. Explain that for me a little bit.
THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS: Yeah, I think we had a moment in the beginning of this century when the country seemed to come -- not everyone in the country -- but a plurality of people in the country, maybe even a slim majority of people in the country, really wanted to put the past oppressions and biases behind us and create this multiethnic society that Barack Obama's figure kind of gave us a hint of what could be. There was a moment when people seemed to want to transcend the kind of conflicts we had been plagued with in the previous century, and Barack Obama's figure was a special, charismatic kind of idea of a post-racial future embodied in the president. And I think that we had a chance. But it didn't last so long.
KLEPPER: I feel like he had an entire media ecosystem on the right that was making Barack Obama the black president.
WILLIAMS: Absolutely.
KLEPPER: That was consistently predicting this, and so in some ways, it felt like this moment was a necessary moment of inclusion. He didn't bring up identity, and identity was somewhat thrust on him as a weapon.
WILLIAMS: Well, it shows how little leeway he had and how there was no room for any mishap, and that’s what I think is a tragedy of his presidency, actually. It was always too much for one person to ever be able to handle because the moment anybody could kind of put a misstep on you, then it was much more extreme and much more significant than it would have been for another president.
