Obama Slams Trump for ‘Intentionally Trying to Deceive People in Their Most Desperate and Vulnerable Moments’

By Jacob Weindling  |  October 11, 2024 | 11:25am
Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
Climate Barack Obama
Obama Slams Trump for ‘Intentionally Trying to Deceive People in Their Most Desperate and Vulnerable Moments’

We live in truly dark times, on the precipice of an abyss it feels is impossible to return from. A significant portion of Americans have fully detached from reality thanks to a billion-dollar right-wing media ecosystem that may or may not be partially funded by Russian intelligence, all while slimy politicians and capitalists like Donald Trump and Elon Musk egg on and add to this tidal wave of bullshit. This is so endemic that professional liar JD Vance feels comfortable going on national television and saying these are obvious lies, but who cares because they feel true.

Two decades ago, Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness,” meaning something that is not true but still feels true, and truthiness now forms the base of the epistemic model of right-wing reality. Many even admitted last week that an obviously fake AI image supposedly from North Carolina was still real to them because it’s how they felt. We live well beyond a post-truth world now. It’s evolving into something more sinister. As Charlie Warzel correctly titled his excellent piece about misinformation for The Atlantic, I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.

The depravity of this ecosystem is on full display in the wake of Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene, as good information is vital to saving lives threatened by disasters made worse by climate change, but Trump and Musk and their braindead acolytes spread misinformation, endangering the lives of thousands of people affected by a planet becoming increasingly more hostile to life. This should not be treated as normal politics. It’s outrageous.

It feels very quaint and naïve to celebrate a Barack Obama speech in 2024, especially when I have written so much about his failure to meet the historic moment of his presidency and how that contrasts to Joe freaking Biden getting stuff done that Obama could not, but boy can the former president talk. And while it is easy to dismiss a lot of his speeches these days as just Barry playing the hits, there was a palpable rage he brought to his invective against Trump last night in Pennsylvania, cutting through even the hardest cynical outer shells like mine.

He’s right, this is fucking monstrous, and interjecting in the audience’s applause makes this speech feel so much more earnest than when he went through the motions at the DNC (although it was funny when he insinuated that Trump had a tiny dick).

This is a new frontier we have eclipsed in the war that America is losing against misinformation. The moment that Jon Stewart became the most trusted newsman in America, it was clear our inept and self-interested media had created a power vacuum through their abdication of journalistic principles, and the right wing has spent this century filling that vacuum with bullshit. Because the media has lost most of their credibility over the last half-century in the eyes of the public, there is no serious countervailing force able to rebut this perpetual firehose of lies on the right.

We now live in a world warped by climate change that’s only getting worse, where the warnings that scientists have been issuing for decades are being proven true, and demagogues have convinced a significant part of the population that this climate devastation is an intentional attack on America by the Democratic Party. This is dark, and it’s getting darker. Obama was right to cut off the applause he received. Simply stating the obvious problem is not enough anymore, we actually have to do something about this growing pandemic of misinformation, lest it continue to exacerbate our climate crisis and endanger countless people’s lives.

You can watch Barack Obama’s entire speech in Pennsylvania last night embedded below.

 
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