Paranoia and anxiety about a “black man in the White House” drove the Republican Party towards Donald Trump, Barack Obama has said in his new memoir, reflecting on a divided America. Mr Obama, in his most scathing assessment of the outgoing president to date, claimed that Mr Trump offered an “elixir for the racial anxiety” to millions of “spooked” Americans. "It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted," Mr Obama writes. "Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president.”