Former President Barack Obama recently declared that Donald Trump broke a “core tenet” of democracy with his accusations of election fraud during the 2020 presidential election.
These comments come after Trump’s interview last week in which he reiterated that he never conceded the election. In response, Obama said that Trump’s accusations were a “bunch of hooey” and even deemed them dangerous to the electoral process.
“What we saw was my successor, the former president, violate that core tenet that you count the votes and then declare a winner – and fabricate and make up a whole bunch of hooey.”
William Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, also turned on Trump during an interview with The Atlantic.
“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told Jonathan Karl, “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”
Barr’s change in attitude is not entirely surprising following Rudy Giuliani‘s recent law license suspension in New York State. Giuliani’s suspension signaled the beginning of legal consequences for the election fraud rhetoric which began in November 2020.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) recently compared Trump’s accusations of fraud to television wrestling, entertaining but “not real.”
Obama went on to explain the real danger behind the election fraud claims perpetrated by the Trump camp.
“Here’s the bottom line. If we don’t stop these kinds of efforts now, what we are going to see is more and more contested elections,” he said. “We are going to see a further de-legitimizing of our democracy. A breakdown of the basic agreement that has held this magnificent democratic experiment together all these years.”
