Former President Barack Obama described the current “politicization of the military” in Chicago and elsewhere as “a deliberate end run” around established law, arguing President Donald Trump has intentionally weakened the nation’s institutional guardrails.
The comments came into a response to a question about whether America had descended into fascism or authoritarianism on the final episode of the podcast “WTF,” a long-running show hosted by standup comedian and actor Marc Maron. Obama last appeared on the show in 2015.
“I don’t think (those institutional guardrails are) destroyed, but I think they have been damaged, and they’ve been systematic about it,” Obama said, arguing businesses, universities and law firms needed to step up to the current president’s attacks on the law, academic independence, and diversity initiatives.
Outside the campaign trail for his fellow Democrats in 2020 and 2024, Obama has rarely spoken directly about Trump, who recently blasted cost overruns for Obama’s presidential center, which opens next year.
The former president also bemoaned that promotion of democracy and support for civilian control of the military is falling out of the bipartisan norm. “Because when you have military that can direct force against their own people, that is inherently corrupting,” Obama said.
“They just landed in Chicago,” Maron interjected.
Obama did not expound on any specific incidents in his adopted home city, but said the apparent end run around “Posse Comitatus, that says you don’t use our military on domestic soil unless there is an extraordinary emergency of some sort, that when you see an administration suggest that ordinary street crime is an insurrection or a terrorist act, that is a genuine effort to weaken how we have understood democracy that was understood by Democrats and Republicans.”
“If I had sent the National Guard into Texas and just said ‘You know what? A lot of problems in Dallas, a lot of crime there, and I don’t care what Governor Abbott says. I’m going to kind of take over law enforcement, because I think things are out of control.’ It is mind boggling to me how Fox News would have responded,” the former president said.
He called on universities to not compromise basic academic independence over fears that they would lose some grant money from the federal government; for businesses to not be bullied into abandoning diversity initiatives, and law firms to represent who they want, even if doing so risks losing business.
“If convictions don’t cost anything, then they’re really just kind of fashion,” he said. “Here’s the test.”
Standing up gives “courage to other folks and then more people stand up and kind of go, ‘Yeah, that’s not who we are.'”
“‘That’s not our idea of America. We don’t want masked folks with rifles and machine guns patrolling our streets. We want cops on the beat who know the neighborhood and the kids around and that’s how we keep the peace around here. We don’t want kangaroo courts and trumped up charges,’” Obama said. “That’s what happens in other places that we used to scold for doing that.”
The interview also touched on the politics that had led up to Trump’s victory in the current moment, with Obama faulting some progressives for asserting a “holier-than-thou superiority” that Democrats used to say was “dangerous” coming from fundamentalists on the right.
But he said the chickens are coming home to roost for voters that did not fully contemplate the consequences of their presidential choice.
“If you decide not to vote, that’s a consequence. If you’re a Hispanic man and you’re frustrated about inflation and so you decided, ‘Eh, you know what? All that rhetoric about Trump doesn’t matter, I’m just mad about inflation. And now your sons are being stopped in LA because they’re Latino… without the ability to call anybody, just be locked up. Well, that’s a test. There’s some clarity that’s coming about right now.”
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