One day after PresidentDonald Trump’s controversial summit with Russian PresidentVladimir Putinin Helsinki, Finland, former PresidentBarack Obamaoffered a veiled rebuke of his successor.
“We see much of the world threatening to return to a more dangerous, more brutal, way of doing business,” he continued.
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Obama also criticized politicians pushing the “politics of fear, resentment, retrenchment,” saying they are working “at a pace unimaginable just a few years ago.”
“I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish,” Trump said. “And I think we’re all to blame.”
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“Yesterday we had Trump and Putin standing together, now we are seeing the opposing team: Obama and Mandela,” Stremlau said.
During his speech, given in honor of Mandela’s 100th birthday, Obama also discussed the legacy of the anti-apartheid hero who died in 2013.
“He came to embody the universal aspirations of dispossessed people all around the world with hopes for a better life and the possibility of a moral transformation in the conduct of human affairs,” Obama said.
Obama has made unspecific criticisms of Trump in the past. After Trump’s“both sides” responseto the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Obamatweeteda Mandela quote that began, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.”
And in December, in aninterviewwithPrince Harryon BBC Radio, Obama urged leaders not to use social media in a way that divides people.
“All of us in leadership have to find ways in which we can recreate a common space on the internet,” he said. “One of the dangers of the internet is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases.”
Privately, Obama has been less restrained. Describing his election night 2016 phone call with Trump, in which the businessman suddenly professed his “respect” and “admiration” for Obama after years of racist hectoring, Obama told two friends in November:“He’s nothing but a bullsh–ter.”
source: people.com
