Former President Barack Obama has warned that the United States is at “an inflection point,” criticising President Donald Trump and his aides for exploiting political violence to attack opponents and further divide the nation. Speaking at an event hosted by the Jefferson Educational Society in Erie, Pennsylvania, Obama pointed to the recent killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, saying that while the tragedy should unite Americans, Trump’s rhetoric was pushing the country in a dangerous direction.“When I hear not just our current president, but his aides who have a history of calling political opponents ‘vermin,’ enemies who need to be ‘targeted,’ that speaks to a broader problem that we have right now and something that we’re going to have to grapple with,” Obama said. He added: “When we have the weight of the United States government behind extremist views, we’ve got a problem.” Obama stressed that while extremism exists on both sides of politics, leaders have a duty not to empower it. He contrasted his own approach and that of former Republican presidents with Trump’s willingness to use executive power in ways he described as norm-breaking. Citing Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Washington and ID checks by federal agents in Los Angeles, he said: “Many of the guardrails and norms that I thought I had to abide by as president … suddenly those no longer apply. And that makes this a dangerous moment.”
The former president said the assassination of Kirk, a close Trump ally and founder of Turning Point USA, should not be used to inflame divisions. “There are no ifs, ands or buts about it: The central premise of our democratic system is that we have to be able to disagree and have sometimes really contentious debates without resorting to violence,” he said. Obama described Kirk’s death as “a tragedy” and “horrific,” insisting that political violence is “anathema to what it means to be a democratic country.”Obama also applauded Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, for urging civility in the aftermath of the killing, noting that while they disagreed on many issues, Cox had shown that “it is possible for us to disagree while abiding by a basic code of how we should engage in public debate.”The White House pushed back strongly against Obama’s remarks, with spokeswoman Abigail Jackson calling him “the architect of modern political division in America” and accusing him of using his presidency to “sow division and pit Americans against each other.”Still, Obama urged citizens across the political spectrum to defend America’s democratic traditions. “We’re at an inflection point in the sense that we always have to fight for our democracy and we have to fight for those values that have made this country the envy of the world,” he said. “Democracy is not self-executing. It depends on us as citizens … to stand up for certain core values, because otherwise we may not have them.”
