“It is up to all of us to fix this.” In his first public speech since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, Barack Obama urged Americans to defend democratic values and called on institutions—particularly universities and law firms—to resist the administration’s attacks.
“I have deep differences of opinion with my most immediate successor—who’s now president once again,” Obama told students of Hamilton College, without naming Trump directly, “but at least for most of my time, I’d say the post-World War II era, there was a broad consensus between Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals around a certain set of rules where we settle our differences—[…] bonds that transcend party, region, or ideology.”
That shared understanding, the two-term former Democratic president explained, was rooted in the “basic notion of American democracy as embodied in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights,” which affirm that “all of us count, all of us have dignity, all of us have worth that we’re going to set up a system in which there’s rule of law and separation of powers and an independent judiciary.” This “ideal,” Obama acknowledged, “wasn’t always observed,” but remained “the right ideal to have.”
Still, he warned, “I do believe that our commitment to those principles has eroded” after years of taking them for granted. “I think people tend to think, oh, democracy, rule of law, independent judiciary, freedom of the press. That’s all abstract stuff because it’s not affecting the price of eggs,” Obama observed. “Well, you know what? It’s about to affect the price of eggs.”
He challenged his audience—students, but also all U.S. citizens—to stand up to the Trump administration’s agenda: “It has been easy during most of our lifetimes to say that you are progressive or say that you are for social justice or free speech and not have to pay a price for it.” “It’s not enough to say you’re for something; you may actually have to do something.”
Addressing those targeted by executive orders for their connection to attorneys involved in prosecution efforts against Trump during Biden’s presidency or for representing the current administration’s political opponents, Obama said: “If you’re a law firm being threatened you might have to say, okay, we will lose some business because we’re going to stand for a principle.”
“If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right? Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion? If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment,” he pointed out, responding to recent funding cuts.
The Trump administration has frozen or suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in federal support to leading academic institutions, citing alleged civil rights violations—particularly related to antisemitism on campus—and noncompliance with new restrictions on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. Columbia University lost $400 million in grants and contracts; Cornell and Northwestern universities had over $1 billion and $790 million frozen, respectively. Brown, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania have also been targeted, while Harvard and MIT face ongoing investigations.
“We’ll stand up for what we believe in,” Obama continued, “and we’ll pay our researchers for a while out of that endowment, and we’ll give up the extra wing or the fancy gymnasium – that we can delay that for a couple of years because academic freedom might be a little more important.”
The former U.S. president also warned against Trump’s approach to foreign affairs. “I think that [the idea] that might makes right and the powerful bully the weak, and you grab but you can, if nobody can stop you, has sort of been the default rule of most of human history. Democracy is pretty recent in its vintage. An international order where you cooperate instead of fight, it’s new. So it’s a little bit fragile.”
Cover photo: Former US President George W. Bush and former US President Barack Obama at the inauguration of US President Donald Trump in the Rotunda of the US Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla / POOL / AFP)
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