President Donald Trump on Thursday came under a sharp, albeit veiled, attack from his two immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and George W Bush, with both denouncing the prevailing political atmosphere of division, hate and fear. They held forth at different venues and were pointed in their comments but neither of them mentioned Trump by name.
In his first public appearance at a campaign rally since leaving office nine months ago, Obama said: “You’ll notice I haven’t been commenting on politics a lot lately, but here’s one thing I know: If you have to win a campaign by dividing people, you’re not going to be able to govern. You won’t be able to unite them later if that’s how you start.”
“We’ve got folks who are deliberately trying to make folks angry, to demonize people who have different ideas, to get the base all riled up because it provides a short-term tactical advantage,” said Obama, speaking in Richmond in support of Democrat Ralph Northam in next month’s Virginia gubernatorial race.
Investing the race with a larger significance than a mere State contest, he commented: “We need you to take this (contest) seriously because our democracy is at stake, and it’s at stake right here in Virginia.”
Bush’s denunciation of the Trump dispensation was even sharper. “Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” he said, speaking at the Bush Institute’s Spirit of liberty event in New York, adding: “Bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed.”
Without referring to Trump even once in the course of a long, stinging offensive, Bush spoke of the “bullying and prejudice in our public life” and the isolationism that was being promoted in the name of nationalism.
“We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism — forgetting the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America,” Bush said, noting: “We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade — forgetting that conflict, instability, and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism.”
“We have seen the return of isolationist sentiments — forgetting that American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places, where threats such as terrorism, infectious disease, criminal gangs and drug trafficking tend to emerge. In all these ways, we need to recall and recover our own identity,” he said.
Obama, who also campaigned in New Jersey’s gubernatorial race for Democrat Phil Murphy, said: “Some of the politics we see now, we thought we’d put that to bed. I mean, that’s folks looking 50 years back. It’s the 21st century, not the 19th century.”
In an oblique attack specifically of Trump’s approach to foreign policy, Obama commented: “The world counts on America having its act together. The world is looking to us as an example. The world asks what our values and ideals are, and are we living up to our creed.”