Plan B Forum

URBANA, Ill. — Former President Barack Obama re-entered the national political debate on Friday with a scathing indictment of President Trump, assailing his successor as a “threat to our democracy” and a demagogue practicing the “politics of fear and resentment.”

In a dramatic break from the normal deference former presidents usually show to incumbents, Mr. Obama ended a long period of public reticence with a lacerating assessment of Mr. Trump. Sometimes by name, sometimes by inference, he accused him of cozying up to Russia, emboldening white supremacists and polarizing the nation.

“None of this is conservative,” Mr. Obama told an auditorium of students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “I don’t mean to pretend I’m channeling Abraham Lincoln now, but that’s not what he had in mind, I think, when he helped form the Republican Party. It’s not conservative. It sure isn’t normal. It’s radical. It’s a vision that says the protection of our power and those who back us is all that matters even when it hurts the country.”

Public fears of economic disruption and disorder around the globe, Obama said, have created conditions “ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division.”

Obama mocked Trump’s equivocation in responding to the deadly violence that erupted last year in Charlottesville, Va., when neo-Nazi white supremacists clashed with counter-protesters.

“How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?” Obama asked.

Obama also castigated Trump for trying to curb the constitutional protection of the press.

“I complained plenty about Fox News,” he said. “But you never heard me threaten to shut them down or call them enemies of the people.”

Obama faulted Trump for “undermining our alliances” and “cozying up to the former head of the KGB,” Russian President Vladimir Putin.

(For anyone who might be unclear, the subject line of the thread is intended as sarcasm...)