Obama: Sarah Palin made 'xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories' and racism popular in GOP

 Obama also discusses Trump, who championed the 2011 conspiracy that Obama was not born in the United States. He writes that Trump's birtherism and, in his view, GOP leadership's appeal to white Americans to oppose his agenda was more or less the same.

"In that sense, there wasn't much difference between Trump and [John] Boehner or [Mitch] McConnell. They, too, understood that it didn't matter whether what they said was true," he writes. "In fact, the only difference between Trump's style of politics and theirs was Trump's lack of inhibition."

Obama writes that it was for this reason he used his vice president, Joe Biden, as the administration's go-to negotiator with the Republican-controlled Congress.

"One of the reasons I'd chosen Joe to act as an intermediary -- in addition to his Senate experience and legislative acumen -- was my awareness that in McConnell's mind, negotiations with the vice president didn't inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperation with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do," Obama writes.