Obama’s Harsh New Takedown of Trump Points to a World After MAGA

The forty-fourth president’s library dedication speech was a powerful explication of liberal patriotism—and a much-needed repudiation of the Trump-Vance fascist variant.

All honor is due to whoever decided that the opening of Barack Obama’s presidential center in Chicago should come right before Donald Trump’s planned July 4 gala on the National Mall. The two events will serve as perfect touchstones for the bigger argument that our country’s 250th anniversary is prompting—the argument over American national identity.

The forty-fourth president delivered an emotional speech at the Obama Presidential Center’s opening ceremony on Thursday. It offered a blistering indictment of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president, all without mentioning the words “Donald Trump,” while offering his own ambitious rendering of the American story.

Yet in so doing, the speech also sent an implicit message to Democrats: Defeating Trumpism, MAGA, and the right-wing nationalist vision of America that animates them requires something more than small-bore politics and slogans about “affordability.” It requires a bigger and better story, a positive and aspirational vision, a full-throated declaration of what we liberals think the United States is—and should be—instead.

Obama has long been a spokesperson for the idea of creedal nationalism, which holds that American identity is defined by our founding ideals, versus a nationalism rooted in heritage or ethnicity or race. And so, Obama declared that the “story of America at its best” rests on “shared values that make democracy possible.” They include:

a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government … a belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.

a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government … a belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.

Let’s be blunt: It’s a defining fact of this moment that Trump and his movement simply do not accept any of those things. And it’s important that Obama used this moment to say so. Obama also lionized “the peaceful transfer of power” and called for a reaffirmation of “character, honesty, integrity” and “a sense of duty and honor” in public life. Guess........

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