Former President Barack Obama took President Donald Trump to task for deploying National Guard troops in Chicago, Obama’s hometown, under false pretenses and for violating the law in doing so.
Obama’s comments occurred during an interview on the final episode of comedian Marc Maron’s podcast “WTF with Marc Maron,” released on Monday.
“There is no doubt that a lot of the norms, civic habits, expectations, institutional guardrails that we had—that we took for granted—for our democracy have been weakened deliberately,” Obama said.
He added, “When you have military that can direct force against their own people, that is inherently corrupting.”
Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that military force is needed to deal with supposedly surging crime in cities led by Democratic politicians, over the objections of those leaders in multiple states, including Illinois, California, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C.
Obama said the deployment of those forces appears like “a deliberate end run” of the Posse Comitatus law, which prevents the use of the military as a domestic police force.
The former president also mocked conservatives for going along with Trump’s power grab.
“If I had sent in the National Guard into Texas and just said, ‘You know what, lot of problems in Dallas, lot of crime there, and I don’t care what Gov. [Greg] Abbott says, I’m gonna kind of take over law enforcement because I think things are out of control.’ It is mind-boggling to me how Fox News would have responded,” Obama said.
Obama began his political career in Illinois and the Chicago area, serving as a state senator representing parts of Chicago, then as a U.S. senator before winning the presidency in 2008.
On Sunday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker was similarly forceful in repudiating Trump’s actions against his state.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, shown on Oct. 6.
During an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Pritzker highlighted the fact that in public Trump has claimed crime as a justification for his military deployment while Pentagon memos simultaneously claim the deployments are meant to protect federal immigration agents and agencies.
“They just want troops on the ground because they want to militarize, especially blue cities and blue states,” he concluded.
Trump’s actions, likely fueled by misleading right-wing propaganda on outlets like Fox News, have faced setbacks in court, with federal judges ruling that he doesn’t have the power to carry out his National Guard deployments.
Democratic leaders both in and out of office have been forceful in their condemnations of Trump’s attempts to squash dissent and put himself above the law.
Obama’s comments were the latest in a series of criticisms he has leveled against Trump.
In September, he pointed out how Trump has used the presidency to amplify extremist views, “empowering” them in a way he had not during his time in the White House. That month, Obama also criticized Trump for using the power of the federal government in an attempt to silence talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.
Earlier in the year, Obama said Trump is the reason America is “drifting into something that is not consistent with American democracy.”
