*(Via HuffPost) – President Barack Obama is making his return to the political arena to help embattled Democrats win in November’s midterm elections. And for the first time, Obama publicly called out President Donald Trump by name.
During a speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Friday, Obama said the country is in a “backlash” moment.
“You happen to be coming of age during one of those moments,” Obama told the audience. “It did not start with Donald Trump ― he is a symptom, not the cause. He is just capitalizing on resentment that politicians have been fanning for years. A fear, an anger that is rooted in our past but is also borne in our enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.”
While Obama has in the past blasted Trump and his policies, this was the first speech in which he used his successor’s name.
Obama also addressed Trump’s tone-deaf comments last year, when the president claimed that there were “some very fine people on both sides” during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that saw white supremacists squaring off against anti-racism protesters. Paralegal Heather Heyer, 32, was killed during the protest when a white supremacist struck her with his car.
“We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination, and we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up clearly and unequivocally to Nazi sympathizers,” Obama said. “How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?”
Get the rest of this story at HuffPost.
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