Obama Warns Trump’s Election Fraud Claims Put US Democracy On “Dangerous Path”

Barack Obama has another book to sell, and so, after making a handful of comments in the press (and just a handful of actual appearances) in support of his former VP, Joe Biden, during the campaign, Obama is breaking what has been a long TV interview fast and sitting down with a lengthy feature interview with “60 Minutes”.

And as CBS News often does when it has a particularly big-name guest on America’s most widely watched “TV News Magazine”, teaser clips from the interview were leaked to the press.

In one clip, Obama, who was famously reticent about his successor for a while after Trump won, accused his successor of putting Democracy “on a dangerous path” with his “baseless” election-fraud claims. Obama said the whole story was the result of Republican leaders “who clearly know better” kowtowing to a “volatile” president who “doesn’t like to lose.”

“I’m more troubled by the fact that other Republican officials who clearly know better are going along with this, are humoring him in this fashion,” Obama said. “It is one more step in delegitimizing not just the incoming Biden administration, but democracy generally. And that’s a dangerous path.”

Readers can watch the rest of the interview on CBS’s site.

Obama says Trump’s baseless election fraud claims put democracy on a “dangerous path” https://t.co/DWNvW7uGIB

— CBS News (@CBSNews) November 13, 2020

Obama also stopped by CBS This Morning for a quick sit down with Gayle King, and told King that “when Donald Trump won, I stayed up until 2:30 in the morning, and then I called him and congratulated him.” Obama also complained about voter fraud allegations being “presented as facts” on right-wing talk radio.

Obama also waxed poetic about presidents being “servants of the people”, adding that “it’s a temporary job.”

WATCH: Former President @BarackObama tells @CBSThisMorning co-host @GayleKing it was “disappointing” to see Republicans supporting President Trump’s baseless claims that the election was rigged.

More on @CBSSunday and @60minutes with @ScottPelley. pic.twitter.com/9GP6PJdDY3

— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) November 13, 2020

He also told King that the GOP “obviously didn’t think there was any fraud going on” before Trump’s baseless claims, because “they didn’t say anything about it for the first two days.”

But if there isn’t any fraud, or anything to worry about, won’t these recounts and ballot audits simply help strengthen Americans faith in their democracy, and its ability to adapt to unseen situations?

Meanwhile, the first leaks from Obama’s new book have also hit, with Salon publishing a bit where Obama writes that Americans elected Trump because they “got spooked by a black man in the White House”. Obama also wrote that the GOP took its first step toward embracing the “dark spirits lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party – xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward Black and brown folks – were finding their way to center stage.”

It’s certainly an interesting theory. But when do we get to hear the bit about his feuds with the Clintons, and how Hillary Clinton was a historically weak candidate foisted upon the American people by a corrupt Democratic Party, which really tried to use Obama as a tool to ensure she could ride in on his coattails.

Just some food for thought.