More like when the former president is a classless, political hack and needs to keep attacking to deflect from his attempted coup of his successor.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...n-trump-contains-an-even-more-urgent-warning/
It really boils down to whether or not you believe in the core values the founding fathers believed in.
Greg Sargent summed it up better than I ever could:
Obama’s scathing takedown of Trump contains an even more urgent warning
Former president Barack Obama’s convention speech was suffused with urgency and fear. The man who achieved national renown 16 years ago with another convention speech — an optimistic paeanto the possibilities of national unity — depicted a moment of extraordinary national peril, one in which reelecting President Trump would pose an existential threat to our political system and way of life.
But if we focus mainly on Obama’s palpable urgency about the damage a second Trump term threatens, we risk overlooking the former president’s deeper and, in a way, even more grave warning, and the source of its true force and power.
It’s that one of the most dire threats to self rule is the very act of losing sight of the idea that this self rule — in whatever form and historical context it exists — is itself something worth preserving, worth cherishing, worth fighting for.
Political oratory delivered under extreme national duress has historically drawn urgency from variations of this warning — for two and a half millennia. In his magisterial history of political thought, philosopher Alan Ryan draws a line from Peracles’ funeral oration, delivered over 400 years BCE, to the Gettysburg Address 157 years ago, noting they are the “greatest defenses ever” of the “ethos of a democratic society.”
Peracles spoke to Athenians enduring unexpected suffering during the Peloponnesian War, and Abraham Lincoln spoke to Civil War-battered northerners. But both speeches “praise their country’s founders as well as the dead,” and both “praise the polity and society for which they died.”
Above all, as Ryan recounts, both speeches sought to ignite in their listeners the conviction that they live under “a unique polity” whose “way of life should survive.”
The core of Obama’s scathing indictment of Trump is that in this regard, the current president is utterly devoid of any concern for, or recognition of, the value of our polity and way of life.
Obama’s indictment of Trump
As Obama noted, Trump does not harbor any sense of obligation to act in the interests of all the American people, and doesn’t feel “reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.”
This, Obama added, has led Trump to unleash law enforcement on peaceful protesters, attack the media as the “enemy” rather than respecting its institutional role, and cast aside science and empiricism in favor of treating the presidency as “one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.”
“Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t,” Obama said, citing consequences: Over 170,000 dead from coronavirus, and an economic catastrophe on top of already-soaring inequality due to Trump’s continued embrace of GOP plutocracy.
But beyond those immediate consequences, allowing Trump to triumph threatens the very underpinnings of our democratic system:
Any chance of success depends entirely on the outcome of this election. This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win.
Obama’s reading of American history has long been a familiar one: That despite our unspeakable sins and atrocities, our country has continued to show itself as fundamentally redeemable, through ordinary people’s perpetual struggle to realize the founding ideals, which established a “north star” to guide that struggle in the face of extraordinary odds. In his speech, Obama again offered this reading.
But in some ways the speech represented a departure. While Obama’s reading allows that periods of progress are often followed by backlash and reaction, the overall continued direction hasn’t been in doubt. Until now: As Jonathan Chait notes, Obama depicts Trump as potentially lying outside this cycle, by “warning that American democracy may not survive his immediate successor.”
This is a fear that Obama has privately harbored since 2016, Ryan Lizza reports. Now it’s laid bare.
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