Former US president Barack Obama on Friday came out in open against his successor Donald Trump, blasting his policies and reminding voters that the economic recovery began on his watch and not in this regime, saying “he is a symptom and not the cause”.
Addressing at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, less than two months before the mid-term elections that could determine the course of Trump’s presidency, he said that the democracy in the US was facing the biggest threat of “indifference” and “cynicism”.
“In the end, the threat to our democracy doesn’t just come from Donald Trump or the current batch of Republicans in Congress or the Koch Brothers and their lobbyists, or too much compromise from Democrats, or Russian hacking.
The biggest threat to our democracy is indifference,” Obama said.
“The biggest threat to our democracy is cynicism - a cynicism that’s led too many people to turn away from politics and stay home on Election Day. To all the young people who are here today, there are now more eligible voters in your generation than in any other, which means your generation now has more power than anybody to change things.
“If you want it, you can make sure America gets out of its current funk,” he added.
Launching an unprecedented attack on Trump and his policies, Obama said: “It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause.”
“He’s just capitalising on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years. A fear and anger that’s rooted in our past, but it’s also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes,” he said.
The former president said his presidency of eight years pulled the US economy out of crisis.
“But to this day, too many people who once felt solidly middle-class still feel very real and very personal economic insecurity.”
“Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and our combat role in Afghanistan, and got Iran to halt its nuclear programme, the world’s still full of threats and disorder,” he said, adding that comes streaming through people’s televisions every single day.
