Donald Trump “has proven Jeremiah Wright correct about a lot of things”, said Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter and deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama and still a close aide to the ex-president.

“If you look at the things that Jeremiah Wright was kind of canceled for, it was saying America was a nation founded on racism. Well, it’s a fairly common view these days. 9/11 was the chickens coming home to roost? I make versions of that argument every time I write for the New York Times : that American foreign policy has blowback.”

Rhodes was discussing Wright because the Chicago pastor was at the center of a fraught episode in Obama’s rise to power, which forms a key chapter in his new book, All We Say – The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches.

During the 2008 Democratic primary, footage emerged of Wright featuring lines like “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human” and calling Obama, to whom he ministered, “a Black man living in a country and a culture…