(Adnkronos) – Barack Obama raises the alarm that with Donald Trump in the White House, the United States is “dangerously close” to allowing government officials to act in a way “consistent with autocracies.” Speaking to a civic group in Hartford, in complex and delicate hours both on the domestic and foreign policy fronts, the former Democratic president made a precise examination of the dangers that American democracy is facing, according to the New York Times.
“If we regularly follow the statements of those who are now leading the federal government, we notice a weak commitment to respecting what is meant, not only by my generation but at least since the Second World War, to be the functioning of a liberal democracy,” Obama said in the discussion with Cox Richardson, a historian known for his anti-Trump positions. The former president recalled how democracy requires that executive officials, particularly those in the Justice Department and judges, commit to upholding the laws and the Constitution.
“It requires that they take their oath seriously and when that doesn’t happen we begin to slip into something that is not consistent with American democracy, but with autocracies, with Hungary under Orban.” “We are not quite there yet, but we are dangerously close to normalizing behaviors of this kind,” he then warned. “We need people outside and inside the government to say, ‘let’s not fall into that ravine from which it is difficult to recover.'”
