Today Barack Obama delivered his first public remarks since leaving office, at a panel discussion on civic engagement and community organizing at the University of Chicago. Many observers had wondered whether Obama would take on President Trump directly, by criticizing Trump’s policies and rhetoric, or explicitly encouraging resistance to Trump’s presidency.
Obama didn’t do this. But he did take on Trump — tacitly. He did this by invoking the type of politics that Trump employs — grievance politics. And he countered it with his own politics — the politics of empathy.
While it might have been more delicious, both for the media and Obama’s supporters, if he had taken a more combative approach to Trump, Obama handled this the right way. He aimed to inspire and motivate — rather than anger — his base. And he made it impossible for Trump defenders to plausibly accuse him of undermining Trump.
Obama took as his starting point his own history as a community organizer. This, he said, “taught me that beneath the surface differences between people,” there were nonetheless “common values that stitched us together as Americans.”
Obama didn’t have to say it, but Trump does the opposite of this. He scares citizens into thinking people different from themselves are enemies who should be ignored, viewed with suspicion, or demonized. While Trump has frequently described inner cities, including Chicago, as blighted wastelands where people have no jobs, no education, and “get shot walking down the street,” Obama portrayed them as a place to learn about one’s fellow Americans.
Obama’s delivery was laid back and jovial. But if you listened carefully, his remarks were studded with pointed counterweights to Trumpism. He described how he had worked with churches that were addressing the fallout from steel plant closures as well as racial tensions in working class Chicago neighborhoods. He didn’t explicitly contrast this approach to rebuilding broken communities with Trump’s, but his description nonetheless brimmed as the antithesis of Trumpian economic and racial grievance. While Trump uses rhetoric to stoke resentment, Obama emphasized how we can reduce resentments — and potentially create political solutions — by simply listening to one another.
Indeed, in possibly his most direct cut at Trump, Obama lamented how “political rhetoric reinforces” the characterization of neighbors “as entirely different from us.” If you meet and talk to inner city residents, he added, you realize they aren’t “thugs.” This was clearly a reference to the inner city caricatures perpetuated by Trump.
Obama also sought to deepen the engagement of young people in politics, by zeroing in on the things they can do to rebuild our political and civic culture. To do this, he touted the accomplishments of the diverse group of six young people on the stage with him today, who had all contributed to civic engagement in their school, university, or community. His advice to young people centered on words like “trust,” “listening,” and “empathy,” all of which he cast as crucial political organizing tools.
In contrast, Trump’s politics thrive on division. He daily airs his own grievances in tweets and public statements, against the press, against his perceived detractors and political adversaries — and sometimes even against his own political allies. From crowd sizes to television ratings to the supposed unfairness of the “fake news” media to Trump’s persistent false claims about Obama himself, Trump’s presidency is being defined by his propensity for grudge matches and spreading false information. Trump launched his political career with a similar targeting of Obama himself, styling himself as the world’s most famous birther, and this lives on today in the form of Trump’s disproven, but not retracted, claim that Obama recently had his phones “wires tapped.”
Today was just the start of what is expected to be a sustained push by Obama to promote civic engagement and cultivate a new generation of leaders. It’s certainly a heavy lift in the current political environment. But the anti-grievance post-presidency of Barack Obama might just be exactly what we need — as a tacit antidote to his successor.
