Former U.S. President Barack Obama believed that the Republican Party did not have the courage to denounce the lies of his successor, Donald Trump, following the recent presidential election and the attack on the Capitol in Washington. In an interview with CNN broadcast on Monday evening, Obama expressed his belief that there were enough reasonable voices within the Republican Party to stand up to Trump.
Obama recalled the Republican billionaire's statements denying any Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and later emphasizing the presence of "good people on both sides" after the violence between far-right extremists and anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville the following year. He stated, "No one in the Republican Party stood up to say, ‘Stop, enough, this is not true,’" considering that leaders within the party faced intimidation that led them to accept what occurred.
He noted that after the January 6 attack by Trump supporters on the Capitol, "a large segment of the elected body was echoing the lies that the election was rigged," as Trump rejected the results, claiming widespread fraud without any evidence. Obama continued, "All those Republican members of Congress kept looking around and thinking to themselves, ‘I will lose my job’" if they did not support what Trump was saying.
Obama remarked, "I did not expect so few to believe in saying, ‘I don’t care about losing my position because this is very important; America is very important; our democracy is very important.’" He viewed the rise of Trump's allies within the Republican Party as a threat to democracy in the United States. The former president emphasized that democratic practice in the U.S. did not arise from nothing or automatically, but is the result of efforts by "generations of individuals" since the country's independence.
