Obama says its ‘hard to hope’ in Trump era during Jesse Jackson funeral

“Every day you wake up to things you just didn’t think were possible,” the former president said Friday. “Each day we’re told by those in high office to fear each other and to turn on each other, and that some Americans count more than others, and that some don’t even count at all.”

For Obama, “everywhere we see greed and bigotry being celebrated, and bullying and mockery masquerading as strength.”

“We see science and expertise denigrated, while ignorance, and dishonesty, and cruelty, and corruption are reaping untold rewards,” he said. “Every single day. We see that, and it’s hard to hope.”

Although Obama campaigned hard against Trump during all three of the incumbent’s presidential campaigns and even before last year’s off-year elections, he did moderate his criticism, at least publicly, during Trump’s first term.

However, since Trump’s second inauguration, Obama has increased his scrutiny, particularly of the president’s pressure on state legislators to redistrict mid-decade, the shooting deaths of anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement demonstrators in Minnesota by federal law enforcement officers, and even the current administration’s dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 Endangerment Finding.

Obama also indirectly responded to Trump’s sharing a video on social media last month in which he and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, were depicted as apes.

“You know, it is true that it gets attention,” he told YouTuber and podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen. “It’s true that it’s a distraction. But, you know, as I’m traveling around the country, as you’re traveling around the country, you meet people. They still believe in decency, courtesy, kindness. And there’s this sort of clown show that’s happening in social media and on television. And what is true is that there doesn’t seem to be any shame about this among people who used to feel like you had to have some sort of decorum. And a sense of propriety and respect for the office, right? So that’s been lost.”

Obama on Friday did use the microphone to memorialize Jackson too, thanking the one-time civil rights activist and two-time Democratic presidential candidate for paving the “path” for a “young black senator from Chicago’s South Side … [to] be taken seriously as a candidate for the presidential nomination.”

“The message he sent to a 22-year-old child of a single mother with a funny name, an outsider, was that maybe there wasn’t any place, any room, where we didn’t belong,” he said.

Barack Obama attended the funeral without his wife, with a spokeswoman for the former first couple not responding to a request for comment as to why.

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Barack Obama was flanked in the front row by former President Joe Biden and former first lady Jill Biden to his left, and by former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as former Vice President Kamala Harris, on his right.

The Clintons appeared last week for separate depositions before the House oversight committee as part of the panel’s investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.