Most presidents stop trying to define the nation\u2019s future once they leave office. But Barack Obama and Donald Trump are refusing to concede the battle for America\u2019s soul on which they first clashed more than a decade ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No modern former commanders in chief have been so present or outspoken about politics, or each other, after returning to private life. But the 44th and 45th Presidents just renewed their battle over the country\u2019s political lifeblood \u2014 democracy \u2014 which has rarely faced a graver assault than from Trump\u2019s election fraud lies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No two individuals better exemplify the current chasm between the two halves of the country: one racially diverse and socially liberal, the other mostly White and conservative. Obama unlocked the aspirations of the first to launch his hope and change crusade and two-term presidency. Trump launched a political movement with a racist conspiracy about Obama\u2019s birthplace and used the latter group to fuel a populist backlash to the nation\u2019s first Black presidency.
And even though a new President, Joe Biden, is now in office, his immediate predecessors \u2014 who revile one another but will be forever linked in history \u2014 still embody the dominant forces tearing at the nation.
Obama issued his latest alarming warning that the democratic values that have prevailed for generations are in danger of failing in an interview with CNN\u2019s Anderson Cooper that aired Monday evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The former President warned the Republican Party that sought to neuter his presidency had taken a much darker turn as many of its key lawmakers now support Trump\u2019s falsehoods about non-existent electoral fraud and whitewash his role in inciting an insurrection against Congress on January 6.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe have to worry,\u201d Obama said, \u201cwhen one of our major political parties is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognizable and unacceptable even five years ago or a decade ago.\u201d
That was some statement from a former President whose own administration was blocked at almost every turn by the GOP, and who once hoped in vain that the conservative \u201cfever would break\u201d with his reelection in 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The interview with Obama aired just two days after Trump unveiled his most flagrant manifestation yet of the Big Lie of a stolen election, as he took his first steps on a comeback trail with a demagogic appearance in North Carolina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m not the one trying to undermine American democracy. I\u2019m the one that\u2019s trying to save it,\u201d Trump said, spinning a new and pernicious reality in which his millions of supporters can take refuge from the truth of the events of 2020.
Multiple courts, election officials in key states and official audits established that Trump lost fair and square to Biden last November, as the ex-President\u2019s spurious suits alleging fraud fell apart. But Republican state legislators have nevertheless acted on his narrative of lies to pass a raft of electoral laws making it harder for Democrats, and especially Black Americans, to vote and to make it easier for partisan local officials to influence the outcome of future elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Biden to counter autocratic impulses at home and abroad
The intensifying struggle over democracy coincided with several other developments that underscore the primacy of this nation defining political theme in 2021. Moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said that he would oppose a sweeping bill his party hoped to pass to counter the GOP moves. His decision, in a 50-50 Senate where the GOP can block Biden\u2019s agenda, makes it hard for his party to halt a drive many Democrats think is a bid to steal the 2024 election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Biden meanwhile is preparing to depart for Europe on his first foreign trip since moving into the White House. He plans to rally Western democracies against the tide of autocracy powered by strongmen in China and Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin will have domestic as well as international significance given US accusations that Moscow twice interfered in US elections to help Trump, who is now trying to dismantle US democratic norms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back in the US, meanwhile, there are new revelations of anti-democratic behavior while Trump was in office. The New York Times reported over the weekend that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows tried to force the Justice Department to investigate absurd voting conspiracy claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And CNN on Monday broadcast new tapes that depicted a phone call in which Trump\u2019s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani sought to pressure Ukraine to announce a probe into conspiracy theories about Biden. In other words, an operative acting on behalf of the former President offered benefits for a foreign power to interfere in an American election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are not many clearer abuses of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018We occupy different worlds\u2019
The style in which Trump and Obama are prolonging their long-distance tussle over America\u2019s future encapsulated the vastly difference experience of their presidencies that played out over the last 12 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Obama, in a sit-down interview, was temperate and spoke in well-sculpted paragraphs. Trump delivered his new assault in a rambling 90-minute screed at a political event that previews a new round of summer swing state rallies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, Obama has become far more outspoken about the toxicity that he sees as taking over the Republican Party than he was in while in power. The 44th President had originally planned to stay out of politics after his two terms in office ended, but he was so alarmed by Trump\u2019s behavior that he decided to speak his mind. No modern president has ever made such strident warnings that the core of American democracy is under threat, as he did for instance during the Democratic convention last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While Republicans argue that the former Illinois senator was hyper-political himself and did not live up to his own calls for unity, events have proven the 44th President\u2019s warnings as prescient. After all his successor denied his election loss, brought a mob to Washington that destroyed America\u2019s tradition of peaceful transfers of power and Republicans nationwide have tried to remove the guardrails that confirmed Biden\u2019s election as president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe occupy different worlds. And it becomes that much more difficult for us to hear each other, see each other,\u201d Obama said on CNN\u2019s \u201cAnderson Cooper 360.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He blamed the root causes of the country\u2019s deep divisions on economic and racial \u201cstratification\u201d and the siloing of the media that means that millions of Americans only hear news that suits their politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe occupy different worlds. And it becomes that much more difficult for us to hear each other, see each other,\u201d Obama told Cooper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is clear that bitter experience and what would once have been seen as unthinkable political turmoil in modern America have scorched the worldview of the man who as a youthful Illinois Senate candidate wowed the nation with his career-making assurance that there is not a \u201cliberal America and a conservative America\u201d or a \u201cBlack America, a White America\u201d but \u201cthere is the United States of America.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018It can happen here\u2019
Trump has never subscribed to the ideal of unity Obama invoked at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. His political method weaponizes division, makes a virtue of chaos and distills grievance into power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBad, bad things are happening to us, perhaps like never before,\u201d the most recent ex-President said in North Carolina. He argued that radical leftists are destroying American freedom. \u201cThey want to silence you, they want to silence your voice,\u201d Trump told his supporters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By unveiling a Senate race endorsement for North Carolina Rep. Ted Budd \u2014 who voted not to certify Biden\u2019s election win \u2014 Trump made clear the price for his support in a party he still dominates is full fealty to his election fraud lies \u2014 and that endorsement only came after his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, decided against running. Trump last month ordered Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California to kill a bill setting up a bipartisan, independent commission to probe the Capitol riot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His former national security adviser Michael Flynn recently agreed that the US needed a coup like Myanmar, an impoverished nation long suppressed by a dystopian military dictatorship where pro-democracy advocates are imprisoned, and peaceful protestors are shot and tortured. He later tried to deny he said what he said, even though it was on tape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A rare Republican with the courage to stand up to Trump, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, was stripped of her third-ranking GOP leadership post in the House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an appearance on David Axelrod\u2019s \u201cAxe Files\u201d podcast, Cheney said on Saturday that Trump\u2019s incitement of the Capitol insurrection was the \u201cmost dangerous thing, the most egregious violation of an oath of office of any president in our history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the autocratic transformation of the Republican Party, which once styled itself as the guardian of global democracy, is that it profits from and advances a parallel attack by Washington\u2019s former Cold War foe Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As well as the election interference to benefit Trump, US intelligence agencies blame Russia for a flurry of cyberattacks on US government facilities and companies. A fresh spate of ransomware attacks on US infrastructure is also believed to originate in Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The degradation of US democratic standards and the corruption of the political system looks familiar to one of Obama\u2019s closest White House aides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser, just published a new book \u201cAfter the Fall\u201d that examines the slide into autocracy in nations like Russia and Hungary. He noted that the latter\u2019s leader, Viktor Orban, had orchestrated a right-wing populist backlash to the financial crisis, packed the courts with conservative justices and redrawn legislative districts and laws to benefit his voters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Orban also enriched cronies and weaponized a propagandistic media machine while wrapping the entire push in a nationalist bow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m thinking this sounds like a familiar playbook, it\u2019s what I\u2019ve lived at home,\u201d Rhodes told CNN\u2019s Bianna Golodryga on CNN International on Monday, referring to Trump\u2019s 2016 campaign and presidency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOn January 6, we learned it can happen here too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Credit: CNN<\/p>\n\n\n\n