Former President Barack Obama will gingerly step into the public fray on Tuesday night, after weeks of quiet grumbling from some demoralized Democrats for what they say is his silence in the face of a frontal assault on liberal America by the Trump administration.
Mr. Obama will participate in a discussion in Hartford, Conn., with Heather Cox Richardson, a popular liberal writer and historian, at a moment of deep uncertainty and volatility for his party, the country and the world.
Domestically over the past week, a Democratic senator was forced to the ground and handcuffed after trying to ask a question of a cabinet secretary at a news conference; a Democratic governor was threatened with arrest by President Trump and with being “tarred and feathered” by the House speaker; and a Democratic state lawmaker in Minnesota and her husband were assassinated in shootings that wounded another Democratic legislator and his wife.
Overseas, speculation has grown that Mr. Trump could order the United States to openly enter the escalating war between Israel and Iran by bombing a key Iranian nuclear facility.
It remains unclear whether Mr. Obama will issue a strong statement on Tuesday evening about any of the violence and chaos of recent days. He has largely shied away from offering a running commentary on politics or on Mr. Trump, declining to take a role as a leader of the opposition. Some Democratic officials and voters have grumbled about his reticence, wanting him to offer more vocal and frequent criticism.
Mr. Obama will be paid for his appearance in Hartford, at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts. Like many former officials, he has participated in a series of similar paid conversations at universities, civil society groups and other public forums over the years.
Behind the scenes, Mr. Obama maintains an open door to Democratic elected officials. He frequently offers advice to congressional leaders, governors, members of Congress and potential candidates who contact him for advice. Next month, he will headline a fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee at the home of Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, according to three people briefed on the plans.
But while he opposes much of Mr. Trump’s agenda, Mr. Obama believes that offering a steady stream of criticism of the administration would dilute the power of his voice, according to people who work with him.
He did make a thinly veiled critique of the Trump administration on Sunday, writing on social media that young immigrants were “being demonized and treated as enemies.” His post noted that it was the 13th anniversary of his administration’s establishment of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allowed immigrants brought into the country as children to remain legally.
His post did not mention Mr. Trump by name, but it prompted a sharp response from the administration.
“If the American people cared what Obama thought, they would’ve followed his advice and elected open-borders radical Kamala Harris,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, told The Daily Beast.
Mr. Obama recognizes that he is unlikely to sway Republicans or Mr. Trump himself with any public critiques, so he focuses on issues where his words can have an effect, according to the people who work with him. In April, he called on universities and law firms to resist intimidation from the Trump administration.
“If you’re a law firm being threatened, you might have to say, ‘OK, we will lose some business because we’re going to stand for a principle,’” he said in a speech at Hamilton College in upstate New York. “If you are a university, you may have to figure out, ‘Are we in fact doing things right? Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?’ If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, ‘That’s why we got this big endowment.’”
At a time when his party’s approval ratings are at historical lows, Mr. Obama remains the most popular living Democrat. But his influence is not what it once was.
While many older Democrats are still nostalgic for the Obama years, an entire generation of voters have reached voting age in the two decades since he became a national political figure. His positions on policing, health care, immigration and trade were publicly rebuked by progressive Democrats during their contentious 2020 presidential primary race. Several of his former strategists, including Jen O’Malley Dillon and David Plouffe, played key roles in the party’s defeat last year.
Many Democrats looked dimly on a campaign appearance last year for Ms. Harris, where Mr. Obama admonished some Black men who he said were not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” Mr. Trump ended up nearly doubling his share of the vote from young Black men from 2020, according to exit polls and post-election surveys.
Still, Mr. Obama remains a draw with donors and on the campaign trail, still able to pack an arena with thousands of supporters. His aides anticipate that he will offer to campaign for Representative Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee for governor of New Jersey, and former Representative Abigail Spanberger, the party’s candidate for governor of Virginia.
Mr. Obama is also busy writing the second volume of his memoir. He is producing television shows and documentaries through his company, Higher Ground, which recently released a documentary on the elite pilots of the Air Force Thunderbirds. And he is preparing for the opening of his presidential center in Chicago, which is scheduled for next spring. The privately run museum will contain digital copies of some of Mr. Obama’s papers.
In private discussions, Mr. Obama has praised his party’s bench of leaders in statehouses and in Congress, saying a new generation must lead Democrats into the future.
He has compared this moment to early 2005, when he arrived in the Senate with Democrats out of power in Washington, according to a person briefed on the conversations. In the 2006 midterm elections, Democrats gained control of Congress. And two years after that, he became the country’s first Black president and re-energized the party.
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
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