JUNE 23, 2020
At an online “grassroots fundraiser” streamed online — which quickly became the campaign’s highest-grossing event to date — the former president recalled how various challenges he walked into when he took office, including the Great Recession and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, were made slightly less difficult because he knew that his predecessor, George W. Bush, “still had a basic regard for the rule of law and the importance of our institutions.”
Trump, on the other hand, was practicing a “shambolic, disorganized, mean-spirited approach to government” that put in existential danger American values, Obama said.
“What we have seen over the last couple of years is a White House enabled by Republicans in Congress and a media structure that supports them that has not just differed in terms of policy but has gone at the very foundations of who we are and who we should be,” Obama said.
“That suggests facts don’t matter, science doesn’t matter, that suggests a deadly disease is fake news,” he added, making a veiled reference to Trump’s comments in February that the coronavirus pandemic was a “hoax.”
“That actively promotes division. And that considers some American in this country more real than others,” Obama continued. “That, we haven’t seen out of the White House in a very long time.”
The former president said that “help is on the way — if we do the work,” adding, “There’s nobody that I trust more to heal this country and get it back on track than my dear friend Joe Biden.”
The event marked Obama’s first appearance of the 2020 campaign with Biden on the virtual trail. Biden announced at the start of the fundraiser that it had raised $7.6 million from 175,000 donors — his campaign’s highest-grossing event to date of the cycle thus far.
Obama formally endorsed Biden in April after Biden’s only remaining rival in the race for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., bowed out of the race.
Courtesy/Source: NBC News
