Former President Barack Obama went on CNN on Tuesday to claim that he finds it worrying that a majority of Republicans “actually believed” that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.
Obama Speaks Out
“To see not only a riot in the Capitol around what historically had been a routine process of certifying an election, but to know that one of our two major political parties, a strong majority of people in this party, actually believed in a falsehood about those election results, the degree to which misinformation is now disseminated at warp speed in coordinated ways that we haven’t seen before, and that the guardrails I thought were in place around many of our democratic institutions really depend on the two parties agreeing to those ground rules and that one of them right now doesn’t seem as committed to them as in previous generations, that worries me. And I think we should all be worried.”
Related: Obama Confidant The Senate Will Vote On Voting Rights Again
Obama Attacks Trump
Obama also went after Trump directly, saying that “surfed” much of the anti-Obama sentiment during his own eight years in the White House.
“One of the perpetrators of that, not the originator of it, but somebody who surfed that for their own advantage was my successor, Donald Trump,” he said. “And we saw how powerful the constellation of conservative media outlets, talk radio, and then, ultimately, all this gets turbo charged with social media, how powerful that is.”
“I think a central question … how do we get back to a place where all of us, as citizens, at least agree on certain baseline facts and certain core principles around how elections work?” Obama added. “There are certain things like that, that right now, are frayed.”
Related: Obama Claims That Making Sure Democracy ‘Continues To Work Effectively’ Keeps Him ‘Up At Night’
Obama Discusses Capitol Riot
Earlier this month, Obama said that the Capitol riot “should remind us that we can’t take our democracy for granted.”
“Around the world, we have seen once vibrant democracies go into reverse, locking in power for a small group of powerful autocrats and business interests and locking out of the political process dissidents and protesters and opposition parties and the voices of ordinary people,” he said, according to The Hill.
“It is happening in other places around the world and these impulses have crept into the United States,” Obama added. “We are not immune from some of these efforts to weaken our democracy.”
This piece was written by James Samson on July 1, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
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