Former President Barack Obama criticized President Donald Trump on Tuesday night, comparing him to an autocrat.
Speaking at The Bushnell Performing Arts Center in Hartford, Connecticut, at a discussion with anti-Trump writer and historian Heather Cox Richardson, the former president warned that liberal democracy in the United States was eroding, implying it was due to Trump’s actions.
“If you follow regularly what is said by those who are in charge of the federal government right now, there is a weak commitment to what we understood — and not just my generation, at least since World War II — our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work,” he said, the New York Times reported.
Obama argued that a democracy requires the bureaucracy and judiciary to uphold the Constitution, something he believed they were not doing.
“It requires them to take that oath seriously, and when that isn’t happening, we start drifting into something that is not consistent with American democracy,” he said. “It is consistent with autocracies. It is consistent with Hungary under Orban.”
“We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that. 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.
The discussion was sponsored in partnership with the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving and The Connecticut Forum. The price of tickets varied according to seating and subscriptions, with the cheapest, rear balcony seats, being $90 and the most expensive front-row seats running up to $645.
Later in the talk, Obama shifted his critique to wealthy Democrats, arguing that they needed to sacrifice more.
“You could be as progressive and socially conscious as you wanted, and you did not have to pay a price,” he said of liberal attitudes during his presidency. “You could still make a lot of money. You could still hang out in Aspen and Milan and travel and have a house in the Hamptons and still think of yourself as a progressive.”
“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 added.
The U.S. has a long-standing tradition in which former presidents rarely critique their successors, something broken frequently by Trump, who sought a rematch against then-President Joe Biden in 2024. Obama has largely withheld direct criticisms of Trump, keeping his critiques behind a thin veil of plausible deniability.
Obama has remained a force to be reckoned with in the Democratic Party since leaving office, usually behind the scenes. His speaking tours take place in front of sold-out audiences, and the party still uses him to draw in big donors at events. His galvanizing message from 2008 is one the disillusioned Democratic Party is hoping to revive.
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However, the blistering defeat suffered by the party in 2024 hasn’t left the former president unscathed. He went back into the spotlight to campaign for then-Vice President Kamala Harris, a campaign that failed to move the needle. The luster of the Obama era has also begun to fade.
“One of the challenges the Democratic Party does have is that there is nostalgia for the Obama era, both in terms of Barack Obama being in the White House and what that meant for the country and the style of leadership that we have, but also like the style of our politics,” Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist, told NBC News last month. “There’s been a de-evolution of our politics over the last 10 years, and it’s just a very different era.”