Obama Offers Careful Warning of a Democratic Slide

Former President Barack Obama warned on Tuesday night that the country was “dangerously close” to allowing its government officials to act in a way “consistent with autocracies,” offering a veiled rebuke of the Trump administration that was delivered with trademark caution, the New York Times reports.

Said Obama: “If you follow regularly what is said by those who are in charge of the federal government right now, there is a weak commitment to what we understood — and not just my generation, at least since World War II — our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work.”

He went on: “We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that. And we need people both outside government and inside government saying, ‘Let’s not go over that cliff because it’s hard to recover.’”