Transference is a psychiatric term for the ability to take your faults and ascribe them to others.  In the dictionary next to the definition should be a photo of former President Barack Obama, particularly the section in his September 7 University of Illinois speech where he attacked President Trump for fomenting paranoia and division:

In a moment reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's outrageous characterization of Trump voters as "deplorable" and "irredeemable," President Obama said: "I have to say this... Over the past few decades, the politics of division and resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party."

Labeling the 63 million Trump voters as "deplorable" and "irredeemable" didn't work out for Hillary Clinton when she ran a failed presidential campaign against Trump in 2016.  Labeling the same voters as divisive, resentful and paranoid will not work for Democrats in the November midterm elections.

No, it will not, and the remarks by this poster child for self-serving hypocrisy and delusion go a long way toward explaining how Obama shrank the Democratic Party by a thousand state, local, and federal legislative seats during his eight years in office.  Once again, to use President Obama's own phrase, he "acted stupidly."

That was the remark President Obama would fire towards the Cambridge, Massachusetts police who arrested black Harvard professor Harry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home for disorderly conduct:

President Obama knocked back some cold beer in the Rose Garden with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and police Sgt. James Crowley of Cambridge, Mass., the two men at the heart last week of a heated debate over race in America[.] ...

The dispute began July 16 when Crowley, while investigating a report of a potential burglary at Gates' house, arrested the agitated professor on a charge of disorderly conduct.  Gates, who is black, accused the white sergeant of racial profiling.  The disorderly conduct charge was dropped – but the dispute exploded into a national debate, particularly after Obama said the police had "acted stupidly" in arresting Gates.

Remember Obama's beer summit, held to talk about how the Cambridge Police acted against the offended black professor Gates?  And then, afterward, who helped Gates down the steps?  The "racist cop," of course.  Obama couldn't be bothered to make sure his friend got down the steps.

From Ferguson to Baltimore and beyond, President Obama's words aiding and abetting the war on cops and inciting racial division have been the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.  He has encouraged a false narrative of racist cops and racist police departments whose officers are guilty until proven innocent, or buried, whichever comes first.  Never mind that in both Baltimore and Ferguson, the cops accused of racism and murder were found guilty of neither.

It was Ferguson, Missouri, where President Obama's Justice Department sent forty FBI agents to prove that Officer Darren Wilson was a racist murder of an innocent black teen. He made the race-baiting Al Sharpton, who helped create the myth of "hands up, don't shoot," a key adviser on race matters and Ferguson.

In December 2014, President Obama stoked the fires of animus against cops when he said on BET that police were judging blacks, not on the content of their character, but on the color of their skin:

President Barack Obama made an appearance on Black Entertainment Television (BET) Monday to reach out to black Americans and discuss calls for criminal justice reform after two grand jury decisions cleared white police officers in the deaths of two black men.  The president has to carefully express his concern for the safety of African-Americans while not undermining the law enforcement community.  President Obama suggested that the issue of police vs. minorities is deeply rooted in American culture and is the result of police having a "subconscious fear of folks who look different."

That is a common theme for the divisive Obama, one he now applies to illegal immigration and border reform, saying those who don't like illegal aliens entering the U.S. to murder our children, like Kate Steinle and Mollie Tibbetts, or oppose sanctuary cities that harbor illegal alien criminals or believe that the rape, torture, and murder gang known as MS-13 aren't here seeking a better life, are racists.

The alleged fear by conservatives of others not like them was a key part of the famous "bitter clingers" remark made during the 2008 campaign:

Barack Obama had not yet locked up the nomination for his party when he revealed his true feelings about gun owners to attendees of a private fund raiser in San Francisco last April:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them.  And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.  And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

In Obama's world, Islam is a religion of tolerance – not so much of Christians, also maligned as "bitter clingers."  He took a shot at Christians when he said at an Easter prayer breakfast that "I have to say that, sometimes when I listen to other less-than-loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned."  Not so concerned was he by the mass beheading of Coptic Christians on a Libyan beach by the Islamic State.

Obama once lectured Christians to "get off their high horse" as they pronounced their teachings to the faithful:

During remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama said that all religions had grappled with radical elements attempting to co-opt its spiritual messages, a rebuke to those who want him to more forcefully condemn what they consider a violent extremism inherent in Islam[.] ...

"Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout history," Obama continued, "and lest we get up on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ."

Obama also named slavery and Jim Crow as examples in America, along with religious intolerance "that would have shocked Gandhi" in India.

Religious intolerance?  Physician, heal thyself.  Jesus preached peace long before the prophet Muhammad mounted a horse, grabbed his sword, and began beheading infidels on his way to Mecca.  As for the Crusades, they came after and in response to centuries of Islamic conquest and aggressive war against the infidels of the Christian West.  As Princeton scholar and Islamic expert Bernard Lewis explains, "The Crusade was a delayed response to the jihad, the holy war for Islam, and its purpose was to recover by war what had been lost by war – to free the holy places of Christendom and open them once again, without impediment, to Christian pilgrimage."  According to St. Louis University and Crusade scholar Thomas Madden, "[a]ll the Crusades met the criteria of just wars."

Slavery was an institution supported by Democrats in the South.  Jim Crow laws were written by Democrats.  Evils may have been committed in the name of Christ, but not at the urging of Christ, who preached peace and love and mercy to one's enemies.

It is Barack Hussein Obama who divided America and incited paranoia, attacking, cops, Christians, and clingers, just to name a few.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor's Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.