Barack Obama has said that Donald Trump has ‘never been shy’ about wanting to take America ‘backwards’.
The former US President is speaking tonight at the O2 in London about topics ranging from free speech in America to how great London is.
He told broadcaster David Olusoga that the US is at a ‘fork in the road’ following the assassination of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk.
But within seconds, Obama’s mic cut off, said Sarah Hooper, a Metro news reporter attending the talk.
He continued: ‘In the United States right now, what’s ascendant, and my successor has not been particularly shy about it, is the desire to go back to a very particular way of thinking about America, where “we, the people” means just some people, not all people.
‘Where there are some pretty clear hierarchies in terms of status and who ranks.’
Describing it as a view that Vladimir Putin ‘very much believes’, Obama said that the US is straying far from the ‘equality’ it was founded on.
He added: ‘The challenge we face is not just to fight against these creeping authoritarian tendencies, but it’s also to be reflective about, “how is it that we lost support for that earlier vision, that better story?”‘
The audience, Obama said, has grown up in a ‘unique period’ of history decades on from the two great wars, the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Japan, where, for a moment, things were on the up.
‘But I think what also happened was we got complacent. We got smug,’ the Democrat said.
‘I understand how this happened, but the Iron Curtain falls, and Mandela’s walking out of prison, and you sense this time that is inflectional.
‘In fact, this was a fairly new and fragile experiment and we didn’t attend to it.’
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On X last week, Obama posted: ‘Freedom of speech is at the heart of democracy and must be defended, whether the speaker is Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel, MAGA supporters or MAGA opponents.’
He added said the Trump administration had taken cancel culture to ‘new and dangerous levels’.
On Friday, Obama will be interviewed by Irish journalist and author Fintan O’Toole at Dublin’s 3Arena.
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