President Obama took the rare step of invoking his successor’s name during a speech on Friday in which he suggested that President Trump is “capitalizing on resentment” to advance his political agenda.
“It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause,” Obama said during his address at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “He is just capitalizing on resentment that politicians have been fanning for years. A fear, an anger that is rooted in our past but is also borne in our enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.”
Obama — who recently released a list of Democratic candidates whom he’s chosen to endorse in November’s midterm elections — emphasized the implications of the midterms in constraining Trump.
“I am here today because this is one of those pivotal moments when every one of us, as citizens of the United States, need to determine just who it is we are, just what it is that we stand for,” Obama said. “And as a fellow citizen — not as an ex-president, but as a fellow citizen — I am here to deliver a simple message. And that is: You need to vote because our democracy depends on it.”
Obama has subtly directed a number of criticisms at Trump in the few public statements he’s made since leaving office, but he appears to be adopting a more direct approach as he begins to stump for Democratic office-seekers across the country, rebuking the president by name. On Saturday, he will speak at a rally for a group of California Democrats. He’ll then travel to Ohio to speak at a campaign event for the state’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Richard Cordray, whom Obama appointed to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Obama’s speech on Friday likely provided a preview of the message he’ll employ in those upcoming campaign events, with its emphasis on attacking the Trump administration’s stewardship of the economy.
“When you hear how great the economy is doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started,” he said to applause and laughter. “When the monthly job numbers come out suddenly Republicans are saying its a miracle.”
A jobs report released on Friday showed that unemployment remains at 3.9 percent while wages grew at 2.9 percent over the last quarter.
“Actually those job numbers are the same as they were in 2015,” Obama said.
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