Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday said Americans are “dangerously close” to living in a fully autocratic nation, and urged the institutions President Donald Trump is going after in order to suppress dissent and force compliance with his agenda to fight back, The New York Times reported.
Obama made the comments in a conversation in Connecticut with historian Heather Cox Richardson in which he said that under Trump, the United States is “drifting into something that is not consistent with American democracy.” Obama said that the U.S. is becoming more like autocrat Viktor Orban’s Hungary, where it is now prohibited to be LGBTQ+ in public and the government is seeking to squash dissent and independent media, as well as ban any organizations that Orban views as a threat.
“We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that,” Obama said. “And we need people both outside government and inside government saying, ‘Let’s not go over that cliff because it’s hard to recover.’”
Obama added that law firms and universities—which Trump is seeking to force into submission by pulling their funding and hampering their business—will have to sacrifice profits in order to keep the country from sliding into an illiberal society.
“We now have a situation in which all of us are going to be tested in some way and we are going to have to decide what our commitments will be,” Obama said, according to The New York Times. “You might lose some of your donors if you’re a university and if you’re a law firm, your billings might drop a little bit, which means you cannot remodel that kitchen in your house in the Hamptons this summer.”
Obama’s comments come as Trump has not only targeted his perceived enemies, but is now arresting his political opposition—a terrifying development that you’d expect from a country like Russia but not a democracy like the United States.
Related | Trump goons arrest another politician, laws be damned
For example, on Tuesday, New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander became the latest Democratic politician to be arrested by federal agents, after masked immigration enforcement officials handcuffed and detained him for asking to see the warrant they had to arrest an immigrant at an immigration court house in Manhattan. The Trump administration blatantly lied about the circumstances behind Lander’s arrest, claiming he assaulted officers even though video footage shows he did nothing of the sort.
“New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer,” the Department of Homeland Security wrote in a post on X, even though video footage shows all Lander did was ask ICE agents to show a warrant. “Our heroic ICE law enforcement officers face a 413% increase in assaults against them—it is wrong that politicians seeking higher office undermine law enforcement safety to get a viral moment. No one is above the law, and if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences.”
Lander was only released after hours in custody after New York Gov. Kathy Hochul marched into the facility where he was being detained and ordered him released.
“I said, ‘I’m not leaving until you let him out. I want him released because what are the charges?’” Hochul said Tuesday night in an appearance on MSNBC. “And after about an hour of me waiting and talking to a lot of people, they said they’d release him without charges.”
Lander’s arrest came days after California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla was manhandled and detained by law enforcement for seeking to ask Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question at a public news conference. Like Lander, DHS officials lied about the incident, claiming Padilla did not identify himself at the news conference, when video footage shows he did just that.
Padilla spoke about the ordeal in a speech Tuesday on the Senate floor.
“I was forced to the ground. First on my knees. And then flat on my chest. And as I was handcuffed and marched down a hallway, repeatedly asking ‘Why am I being detained?’ Not once did they tell me why,” Padilla said. “I pray you never have a moment like this.”
In his Tuesday interview, Obama spoke about the fact that the Trump administration is lying about easily provable facts.
“One of the most pernicious things that has happened is we have a situation now where we’re not just arguing policy or values or opinions, but basic facts are being contested and that is a problem,” Obama said.
Indeed, as George Orwell wrote in his dystopian “1984” novel, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”