From: januarybaybee@gmail.com   
      
   CNN  Updated 7:15 AM ET, Thu August 20, 2020   
      
      
   Obama issues a dire warning about American democracy in stunning rebuke of   
   Trump   
      
   (CNN) From the Philadelphia ground where the American experiment was born, one   
   former president -- in a stunning prime-time address to the nation he once led   
   -- warned that his successor was on the cusp of destroying democracy itself.   
      
   The latest installment of the long duel between Barack Obama and Donald Trump   
   perfectly exemplified the jarring contrasts in personal and political   
   temperaments of the two defining White House residents of this age. And it   
   took their rivalry to a level    
   unprecedented in the modern history of the presidency.   
      
   Obama -- serious and intellectual -- delivered a complex constitutional   
   lecture on primetime television during the virtual Democratic National   
   Convention.   He summoned historic sweep, encompassing the Founders, the Civil   
   Rights Movement, America's    
   immigrant heritage and young Americans he called to action today to save their   
   freedoms just as their ancestors had done every time the country's promise was   
   imperiled.   
      
      
   Trump meanwhile, back at the White House, was rage-tweeting in real time in   
   all-caps, flinging wild accusations and lies that, if anything, provided   
   contemporaneous evidence of his predecessor's somber warnings.   
      
   In 2004, Obama made his name with the youthful, exuberant -- and perhaps naive   
   -- hope of his address to the DNC. Sixteen years on, a grizzled Obama the   
   elder warned America that it should expect a "president to be the custodian of   
   this democracy."   
      
   "We should expect that regardless of ego, ambition, or political beliefs, the   
   president will preserve, protect, and defend the freedoms and ideals that so   
   many Americans marched for and went to jail for; fought for and died for," he   
   said.   
      
   Obama, now a private citizen, has no formal power and no mandate to speak to   
   the American people the way he did Wednesday night, at a virtual convention   
   that in its crowd-free isolation served to underscore the grave nature of his   
   message.   
      
   But he carries the authority of his historic status, the moral weight of two   
   White House terms and enduring popularity in the half of the country revolted   
   by Trump's abuses of power, divisive racial politics and constant cultivation   
   of his own ego.   
      
   And Obama's breach of etiquette for retired presidents was preceded by years   
   of Trump attacking him in ways never previously seen by an American   
   presidential successor, with Trump routinely, baselessly accusing Obama of   
   treason.   
      
   The former President presented himself as a guardian of democracy, of 243   
   years of Constitutional norms and authority borrowed from the masses not   
   imposed from a strongman leader from above.   
      
   "Do not let them take away your power.  Don't let them take away your   
   democracy," Obama said in a plea that was far deeper than a political leader's   
   repudiation of the legacy destroying policies of his predecessor.   
      
   "Make a plan right now for how you're going to get involved and vote.  Do it   
   as early as you can and tell your family and friends how they can vote too,"   
   Obama said, accusing the Trump administration of suppressing the vote and   
   counting on the cynicism    
   of the people to guarantee four more years.   
      
   "What we do echoes through the generations," Obama said, in what amounted to   
   probably the most watched lecture on America's constitutional heritage in   
   history.   
      
      
   A long-awaited salvo   
      
   Democrats have waited four years for Obama to speak up in such a way.  But had   
   he carried on a daily commentary on Trump's outrages, the former commander in   
   chief's warning on Wednesday would have lacked impact as well as the stock of   
   political capital    
   his reticence built among sympathetic voters.   
      
   He rebuked Trump in stunningly explicit terms for a member of the presidents   
   club -- a fraternity the current commander in chief disdains.   
      
   "I never expected that my successor would embrace my vision or continue my   
   policies.  I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might   
   show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the   
   weight of the office and    
   discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care,"   
   Obama said.   
      
   "But he never did.  For close to four years now, he's shown no interest in   
   putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in   
   using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his   
   friends; no interest in treating    
   the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get   
   the attention he craves.   
      
   "Donald Trump hasn't grown into the job because he can't."   
      
   It was a picture of Trump's presidency that is familiar from scores of   
   tell-all books, insider and media accounts and the evidence of a   
   publicity-hungry President who awards himself top marks even in a pandemic   
   that has killed more than 170,000 Americans    
   that he ignored, mismanaged and misrepresented.   
      
   Obama's remarks did not come in a vacuum.  Only hours earlier, Trump had all   
   but endorsed the cult-like and nonsensical conspiracy theory QAnon from the   
   White House podium.  The President is spreading false claims about massive   
   fraud in postal voting.     
   He sought to coerce a foreign power into destroying the candidacy of   
   Democratic nominee Joe Biden, for which he was impeached.   
      
   Trump has ignored or attacked every institution that can hold him to account   
   from Congress to the courts, the Justice Department, military brass and the   
   press.  He retweets Russian intelligence propaganda.  Any restraining   
   influences in his Cabinet have    
   long since been purged.  He may have already crushed the legitimacy of any   
   Biden win in November by warning any election he loses will be "rigged."   
      
   White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany refused hours earlier to state   
   that the President would accept the result of the election. In any other   
   administration this would be a defining scandal. In this White House it barely   
   merited comment.   
      
   In many ways, Trump's entire presidency has unfolded as an attempt to wipe   
   Obama -- who he relentlessly attacked in a racist birther conspiracy that   
   built his political movement -- from the pages of history.  On Wednesday for   
   instance, he made yet    
   another attempt to destroy the Iran nuclear deal that is Obama's most   
   significant foreign policy achievement.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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