This is what it has come to: Our president risks nuclear war in service of his insatiable need to prove his own manhood. My button is bigger than his button and it works!

The imminent release of Michael Wolff’s sensationalist book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, has generated a firestorm of attention. If the book’s claims are even partly credible, Trump’s inadequacies are nearly universally recognized, even by his closest confidants including family members. The man is utterly unfit for office, arguably delusional, and clearly a significant danger to the nation and world.

The factors contributing to his election and his survival in office are debated and dissected in the media constantly. I confess to spending mornings with The New York Times and Valley News and evenings with Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC. Pundits and analysts cite the cultural divide in America, point to the economic plight in the heartland, and opine about the decline of communities and the dissolution of the traditional family.

I suppose these things and myriad others have contributed to the mess we’re in, but the huge, white elephant in the room is seldom mentioned. We have Trump because of racism. The rest of it is just a sideshow.

Donald Trump is the deformed child produced by a racist society. Spare me the “But we elected a black president!” comments. The election of a black president was the stick that poked the hornet’s nest. The hornets were there all along.

A significant portion of the American citizenry deeply resented our first black president. They simmered and slandered, enabled and empowered by Trump’s birther campaign. It is not an accident that GOP leaders never systematically rejected birtherism.

It’s because it served their racist sentiments too, without requiring their explicitly racist involvement. “You lie!” and multiple other incidents occasionally exposed the rancid underbelly of racism but, for the most part, conservative leaders just went compliantly along with the birther/Bannon/white supremacist bandwagon.

Can any reasonable person believe that racism was not the primary impulse driving the rhetoric to limit Obama to one term and to obstruct his every legislative initiative?

Obama could have proposed precisely the same tax bill that just passed, and the GOP would have roundly opposed it.

Do you think that Obamacare, an essentially conservative approach to health care, was branded with his name just for the heck of it? Or was the branding a not-so-subtle way of linking a policy proposal to a black president thereby garnering opposition through this racist association?

Is it just politics as usual that has the Trump administration dismantling every remnant of Obama’s work, regardless of the policies’ political leaning, efficacy or importance?

It is as though everything he touched was tainted by nothing more than his touch.

The 2016 election was the boiling over of years of simmering resentment. Resentment of civil rights and affirmative action. Resentment of feminism. Resentment of gay rights. To a great number of his supporters, Trump’s candidacy was the unifying force that allowed these resentments to coalesce into a political movement. But the racist component is dominant. Women’s rights and gay rights are complicated by the fact that people of all political beliefs and biases have wives, sisters, mothers, daughters and gay relatives. Their whiteness alone offers a slice of immunity from the most virulent bigotry.

I confess to a morbid curiosity that leads to hours reading comments on blogs and websites of newspapers and magazines. The ugliness of anti-Obama sentiment has not diminished, despite the year that has passed since he served. Social media sites, comment chains and barroom chatter focus as much on Obama as the devil as they do on Trump as the savior.

It is irrelevant that Obama was a moderate president who took no particularly progressive stance on any issue. He was dignified and competent. There can be no credible explanation for the lingering hatred other than his skin color.

Trump has made such a mess of things that it is hard to parse out racism among the many acts in his bizarre circus. While we view the three rings of Russian influence, daily tweets and administrative incompetence, we miss the forest. Every legislative and policy effort to mitigate the effects of racism is being dismantled. Rights of minority Americans to vote are under insidious assault. Affirmative action is attacked. School “reform” is re-segregating schools and communities.

I know it is not entirely this simple, but it is mostly this simple: Too many Americans would rather risk the insanity of a nuclear confrontation than have a black man in power.

Steve Nelson lives in Boulder, Colo., and Sharon. He can be reached at stevehutnelson@ gmail.com.