On Saturday, former President Barack Obama spotlighted remarks he delivered the previous day at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit. Obama characterized the domestic threats posed by right-wing extremists such as those behind the attack on the Capitol as mirroring actions of the “emboldened autocrats” around the world who are “ramping up oppression… targeting minority groups… [and] often flouting international law.”
“In my own country, the forces that unleashed mob violence on our Capitol are still churning out misinformation and conspiracy theories,” the former president said. “For those of us who fervently believe in the ideals of democracy, the question is: How do we respond? The point is, if we want democracy to flourish, we will have to fight for it. We will have to nurture it. We will have to demonstrate its value, again and again, in improving the lives of ordinary people. And we will also have to be willing to look squarely at the shortcomings of our own democracies—not the ideal, but the reality. Only then will we be able to tell a better story of what democracy can be, and must be, in this rapidly changing world.” Check out more from Obama below — and read his remarks from the summit in Copenhagen in full at this link:
You can easily see the sort of thing the former president is discussing in the striking contrast between what it is that Democratic leaders currently in power are doing and the priorities list of prominent GOP’ers like Trump himself.
The Biden team is prioritizing ambitions such as rolling out the spending included in the infrastructure deal Biden signed last year, alongside the numerous policy moves undertaken by Biden picks in power across the government. For instance, the Education Department recently announced a cancellation of $5.8 billion in student loan debt held by 560,000 borrowers who’d taken out the loans in association with attendance at an institution run by Corinthian Colleges, a now defunct for-profit educational entity. (Corinthian was sued, before it ended operations, for predatory and deceptive practices.) And what’s Trump doing? Freaking out on his alternative social media platform known as Truth Social about the imaginary fraud he claims cost him the last presidential election. Democracy can work for people — and reiterating such a thing has fallen to those opposite Trump and his various goons.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department and the House committee investigating the Capitol riot are continuing their own probes of matters related to the violence at the Capitol. In conjunction with a public hearing of the riot committee held last Thursday, which featured witnesses including U.S. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who was the first officer injured by rioters at the Capitol, committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) revealed the startling scope of Trump’s inaction on the day of the violence. According to Cheney, Trump “placed no call to any element of the U.S. government to instruct that the Capitol be defended. He did not call his Secretary of Defense on January 6th. He did not talk to his Attorney General. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security. President Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day, and he made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and deploy law enforcement assets.”
Future hearings by the committee will include witnesses such as a trio of officials who served in the Justice Department during Trump’s time in office.
