Early this year, I lamented that the nation’s former presidents had not come forward, forcefully and ideally as one bipartisan unit, to condemn the utterly condemnable incumbent.
At the time I wrote, armed and masked federal agents that President Trump had sent into American cities to enforce his immigrant deportations had recently killed two citizens and were roughing up and violating the civil rights of countless legal and undocumented residents alike. At military bases, Trump goaded young service members, who are bound by a code of nonpartisanship, to boo past Democratic presidents and to vote Republican. He’d posted a caricature online of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. And those were just the highlights in that moment of Trump’s presidency of lowlights.
I asked then: “Where are the statesmen when the state is under siege by the current head of state?”
Finally, belatedly, as Americans have begun voting in midterm elections that are a referendum on Trump, a couple of them — Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — have stepped up. Especially Obama, easily the most popular of the ex-presidents. The two men have set aside the traditional deference within the presidential fraternity, a norm (ignored, like others, by Trump) that dates to George Washington. As well they should: From Washington on, Americans have never seen a president as corrupt, incompetent and contemptuous of the Constitution as Trump.
Obama’s and Clinton’s separate stumping on the campaign trail is not the united front of ex-presidents that I’d hoped for. Joe Biden suffers from metastatic cancer, and many Democratic candidates wouldn’t welcome him anyway. And George W. Bush has retired from presidential politics, his office said in 2024. Both Bush’s daughter Barbara and brother Neil have made known that they’re supporting Democrat James Talarico for Texas senator over Republican and Trump vassal Ken Paxton.
Neil Bush, in his statement, went beyond Paxton to skewer Trump: “I believe Donald Trump and those who have enabled him have done enormous damage to the Republican Party. I worry about a political culture in which loyalty to an individual takes precedence over loyalty to principle, and where those who hold power begin to believe they are no longer accountable.”
His older brother must surely agree, right? If only W would say so, and more.
Obama and Clinton, for their parts, have waited until midterm elections voting has begun and the outcome — a potential blue wave — seems clear. The likelihood of an electoral repudiation of Trump and his party is thanks not to their efforts, but to the voters themselves.
Organically, a leaderless protest movement of sorts has taken shape, uniting Democrats, independents and a good number of repelled Republicans. Trump calls MAGA a movement, and it is. But he’s the unwitting organizer of this countermovement as well, thanks to his sorry record of self-aggrandizement, cruelty and a needless war that broke both his no-wars campaign promise and the one about bringing down Americans’ cost of living. (Moody’s Analytics recently reported that the Iran war has cost the average U.S. family more than $2,000.)
The growth of an anti-Trump movement this year has been reflected in the shrinkage of his approval rating in polls, and the turnout both at No Kings demonstrations and in special and off-year elections that Democrats won, many in upsets. It is voters, not political leaders, who’ve created a climate for change that now is threatening Republicans even in red states.
In fairness to Obama, the onetime community organizer, that voter-driven, bottom-up energy is just what he’s long argued for.
He famously said in his 2008 presidential campaign: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person.… We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Years later he reiterated in his farewell speech in Chicago, “Change only happens when ordinary people get involved and they get engaged and they come together to demand it.”
And Obama was still on-message on Saturday, telling a full house at a rally for Michigan Democratic candidates, “We’ve got to start showing what a future on the other side of this administration can look like, and that starts with all of you.”
Still, “ordinary people” welcome leaders who can harness their energy, give voice to it and spread the message to others on the sidelines. Which is why Obama, and to a lesser extent Clinton, are welcome now. (Meanwhile, Trump stumps in ruby-red states that national Republicans have long taken for granted, not building his MAGA movement but trying to hold it together and to prod demoralized Republicans to vote.)
As once-and-future Republican presidential aspirant Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said enviously on Monday: “Barack Obama may be the most effective Democrat politician of our lifetime. His ability to communicate is really powerful and really dangerous.”
The message of both Obama and Clinton is by turns entertaining and serious. The entertainment is the mockery they each deftly employ against Trump, knowing how easily it pierces his thin skin. Both belittle Trump’s obsession with redecorating the White House. “He should be on HGTV,” Obama cracked, adding to easy laughs, “What’s up with the gold?” Clinton likened Trump’s Rose Garden makeover to “what looks like the entrance to Liberace’s bathroom.” (Has he seen what Trump has done to the bathroom in the Lincoln Bedroom?)
Obama belittled tough-talking Trump’s fight with “that well-known evil empire, Canada,” while Clinton huffed more seriously during a campaign stop in Florida, “I’m tired of treating our allies like they’re dirt,” worst of all Trump’s moves “to abandon Ukraine and embrace Vladimir Putin.” Both call out Trump for his corruption, his dismissal of Americans’ struggles with grocery prices, housing costs and healthcare, and his betrayal of American values and global leadership.
All of which is why we shouldn’t have to wait until election time to hear from the former presidents, of both parties, about the unprecedented threat Trump poses. But there’s still time post-election. As Obama told Michiganders, “Like it or not, we’ve got two more years of this administration.”
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