Former President Barack Obama issued rare criticism of President Donald Trump on Tuesday night, without mentioning Trump by name, saying the current administration has a “weak commitment” to upholding democratic principles.
The Context
Former presidents typically refrain from criticizing their successors, but Obama has on occasion referenced Trump while discussing the erosion of democratic norms, efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and attacks on critical programs like Medicaid and Social Security.
Obama’s comments this week come as the Trump administration has deployed the National Guard and active-duty U.S. Marines to crack down on demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Los Angeles, and after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth refused to commit to following court orders on deploying the military to U.S. cities.
Jack Gruber/Pool Photo via AP
What To Know
Obama made his comments at a civic group event in Connecticut, hosted by the writer Heather Cox Richardson, a critic of Trump.
“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,” Obama told Richardson.
The former president pointed to attacks on the judiciary that have come from both Trump and those within his administration, as well as threats to press freedom and the right to peaceful protest.
Obama said that democracy “requires them to take that oath [to the Constitution] 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] Orban,” Obama added, referring to the Hungarian prime minister, who said in January that Trump’s return to office marked the beginning of Hungary’s “golden age” and the “collapse” of liberal democracy.
Obama told Richardson that “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,'” he added.
A White House spokesperson addressed Obama’s comments, telling Newsweek in a statement: “With a mandate from the American people, President Trump is confidently and quickly stripping unelected bureaucrats of government overreach, minimizing the scope of the federal government, and returning power back to the states and money to taxpayers’ wallets.”
What People Are Saying
The White House said in its statement: “For years Republicans have advocated for a more limited government and numerous Conservative candidates have campaigned on scaling back the federal government’s reach, but President Trump is the only political figure in modern history to follow through on this commitment.”
Update 6/18/25, 5:37 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with additional information.
