While literary critics applaud Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father for its polyvocal self-authorizations, the book’s broader cultural context shows how politics and public performances constrain possibilities for multicultural identities. The fluid personal identity authorized by the book faces political pressures that require public reaffirmation of dominant narratives of both Whiteness and monocultural American supremacy. I trace specific counterattacks on Obama’s identity during the 2008 U.S. presidential election cycle, including "controversies" around his birth narratives. I evoke my own narratives as a Brown-and-bearded American immigrant to complicate my audiencing of Obama’s performative responses to "Birtherism" even after he was elected president. I focus especially on his interaction with Donald Trump prior to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011. In such moments, I argue that Obama navigates away from self-authorizing his multicultural American identities and toward authorizing American power in ways that reinscribe a monocultural nationalism.