Former President Barack Obama has issued a stark warning that American democracy is nearing a perilous tipping point.
Speaking in Hartford, Connecticut, on Tuesday evening, Obama described the nation as “dangerously close” to embracing autocratic behaviour, a rebuke widely interpreted as directed at the Trump administration, even though he did not mention Donald Trump by name.
In a time of heightened national anxiety, Obama’s voice has increasingly become a moral compass for many. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah recently referred to him as America’s “emotional support president”, a figure of reassurance amid a political landscape fraught with racism, transphobia, homophobia, and attacks on reproductive rights.
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While Obama refrained from calling out President Donald Trump directly during his remarks, his pointed language left little doubt about whom he was referencing. Recordings of the speech were prohibited, but according to The New York Times, Obama cautioned:
“If you follow regularly what is said by those who are in charge of the federal government right now, there is a weak commitment to what we understood — and not just my generation, at least since World War II — our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work.”
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He continued, “It requires them to take that oath seriously, and when that isn’t happening, we start drifting into something that is not consistent with American democracy. It is consistent with autocracies. It is consistent with Hungary under [Viktor] Orbán.”
Obama warned that the normalization of authoritarian tendencies poses a dangerous threat to the country’s future.
“We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that. And we need people both outside government and inside government saying, ‘Let’s not go over that cliff because it’s hard to recover.’”
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His remarks come at a time when political tensions in the U.S. are reaching a fever pitch. Over the weekend, Trump staged a $45 million military parade, which Republican Sen. Rand Paul likened to displays seen in North Korea and the former Soviet Union. That same day, some 2,000 “No Kings” protests took place nationwide to oppose Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.
Though Obama himself deported nearly 3 million people while in office, earning the nickname “deporter in chief”, he has since been cast by Trump as weak on immigration. Meanwhile, Trump’s administration has taken an aggressive stance, threatening to arrest Democratic leaders like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom for resisting federal immigration enforcement.
“What’s happening is that we now have a situation in which all of us are going to be tested in some way, and we are going to have to then decide what our commitments are,” Obama was quoted in a CNN report. “It will be uncomfortable for a time, but that’s how you know it’s a commitment – because you do it when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy, not just when it’s trendy, not just when it’s cool.”
Political violence has also escalated. Over the weekend, two Democratic lawmakers from Minnesota and their spouses were reportedly shot in separate incidents. One of the lawmakers and her spouse were killed, while the other couple survived. The shootings are being investigated as politically motivated attacks.
