President Obama Gives 'State Of Our Democracy' Speech, Slams Trump
By: Kayla Pasacreta
President Obama is back on the campaign trail, and whew chile he is throwing shots at Trump.
In a speech today at the University of Illinois, Obama, for the first time publicly, directly said Donald Trump's name while calling out the administration. Obama used the speech to drive home the importance of voting in midterm elections, calling it 'dire' and pointing to the urgency of this moment, "This moment really is different. The stakes really are higher."
The speech was blistering, much different from Obama's previous, more subtle aims at Donald Trump and the Trump White House. Referencing Donald Trump's response to Charlottesville, Obama implored, "How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?" During his speech, he also mentioned the divisiveness is the country, stating, "It did not start with Donald Trump," he continued, "He is a symptom not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years, the fear and anger that’s rooted in our past.” He called the resentment "a backlash of progress,"
“People in power want us to believe that the rest of us are powerless to solve our problems through democracy. And when people stop showing up, like in 2010 and 2014 where fewer people voted, a vacuum forms, and a politics of fear and resentment fills that void.”
He continued to say Trump's politics are not conservative, “It’s not conservative. It sure isn’t normal. It’s radical. It’s a vision that says the protection of our power and those who back us is all that matters.”
He also pointed to the recent op-ed anonymously published in New York Times by a senior official of the Trump Administration, saying the resistance within Trump's own administration is 'not normal',
“The claim that everything will turn out okay because there are people inside the White House who secretly aren’t following the President’s orders, that is not a check...I’m being serious here. That’s not how our democracy’s supposed to work. These people aren’t elected. They’re not accountable.”
”They’re not doing us a service by actively promoting 90% of the crazy stuff that’s coming out of this white house, and then saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’re preventing the other 10%.’ That’s not how things are supposed to work. This is not normal. These are extraordinary times. And they’re dangerous times.”
Amid his attacks on Trump, he also defended his own previous administration, telling the crowd, “Let’s just remember when this economy started improving."
Barack Obama will continue campaigning for several Democratic candidates in California into the weekend.
