Just two days before the end of his presidency, Barack Obama hosted a White House press conference in which he said he expected the Trump administration and congressional Republicans to make their own determinations about the nation’s direction — and, by and large, he intended to stay out of it.
The retiring Democrat acknowledged at the time, however, that there might be exceptions to the rule. “There’s a difference,” the outgoing president explained, “between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake.”
Nearly nine years later, I can’t help but get the feeling that Obama sees our core values in jeopardy much more often. Take this week, for example. Politico reported:
Barack Obama has accused President Donald Trump of ‘violence against the truth’ for linking autism to the use of Tylenol by pregnant women. The former president made a direct attack on his successor that was as rare for its forcefulness as for its setting — an arena stage on foreign soil in London on Wednesday — as he warned that the Trump administration’s claims undermine public health.
Speaking to a large crowd at London’s O2 Arena, the former president said, “We have the spectacle of my successor in the Oval Office, making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproved.”
He added, “The degree to which that undermines public health, the degree to which that can do harm to women who are pregnant, the degree to which that creates anxiety for parents who do have children who are autistic — which, by the way, itself is subject to a spectrum, and a lot of what is being trumpeted as these massive increases actually have to do with a broadening of the criteria across that spectrum so that people can actually get services and help. All of that is violence against the truth.”
And while it’s true that Obama was speaking at the time to a foreign audience, it’s also true that he wanted a domestic audience to be aware of his comments: The Democrat promoted excerpts from his appearance, including his Trump criticisms, via social media.
This was notable in its own right, especially given how dangerous Trump’s misguided claims about medicine, vaccines and public health have been. But circling back to our recent coverage, it’s also worth emphasizing the recent pattern involving the former president.
In April, Obama spoke at Hamilton College, where he took aim at Trump’s trade tariffs, condemned the White House’s offensive against higher education, expressed his concerns that the values of the United States have “eroded” and said the incumbent president’s efforts to extort law firms were “contrary to the basic compact we have as Americans.”
In June, Obama spoke at The Connecticut Forum in Hartford, warning that the country was “dangerously close” to normalizing behavior “consistent with autocracies.”
In July, after the White House started falsely accusing him of “treason,” Obama’s patience wore thin, and he issued a statement about how “ridiculous” Team Trump’s claims had become.
In August, Obama publicly condemned the GOP’s mid-decade gerrymandering schemes — they represent “an existential threat to our democracy,” he said in a video — while having private chats with rising Democratic stars such as Zohran Mamdani and touting his party’s recent victories in special elections.
In September, Obama slammed Trump for politicizing the Charlie Kirk shooting and not doing more to unite the country, before taking rhetorical aim at the right’s recent efforts to undermine the First Amendment.
A week later, the former president also shared a few thoughts about his successor’s anti-Tylenol rant.
When thinking about Trump’s most prominent and most vocal Democratic critics, Obama does not spring immediately to mind. That, however, is starting to change.