New NYT: Why Obama is often accused of being disloyal

From my new Upshot column:

When Rudolph Giuliani said that he does “not believe that the president loves America,” he became the latest in a long line of public figures to question the loyalty or allegiance of the country’s first nonwhite president. While these criticisms are ostensibly directed at Barack Obama’s worldview, as Mr. Giuliani later said, they appear to reflect — or exploit — the tendency to associate being American with being white.

Mr. Obama’s loyalty to the United States has been questioned in this way since he reached the national stage. Just as people wrongly doubted that the president was born here, many prominent figures in national politics have smeared him as disloyal, often by suggesting that he is on the side of Islamic extremists (which plays on the related myth that he is Muslim rather than Christian).