But I took it for a sign things were getting better.
I felt that way until about midway in Obama's time.
That's when I felt like we were starting to backslide.

I may be mistaken, but once I saw Obama win his 2nd term, I started to sense a backlash. It was a dividing line, although it didn't become really clear until the following election.
Its like a certain proportion of the country (about a third) decided "That's enough, we have to stop this."

Trump didn't bring these people out. They put him in office. All of his other issues and campaign promises were secondary. All that really mattered was taking the country back to its segregated past, and to stop those people (the LIBS) who were moving it forward.

Yeah. I know. They'll claim race had nothing to do with it. Bullshit. Maybe race didn't have everything to do with it, but it had mostly to do with it.
Like I said. Its where all the circles in the Venn diagram intersect.

I've been aware of the world around me for a long time now, and I have knowledge of things that happened long before I was born that affect us today. Young folks are perfectly capable of understanding what is happening to them now, but us old folks see how it fits in to the overall flow of the time line. At a certain age, you start seeing the patterns.