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Barack Obama has called on US citizens, colleges and law firms to resist Donald Trump’s political agenda – and warned Americans to prepare to “possibly sacrifice” in support of democratic values.
“It has been easy during most of our lifetimes to say you are a progressive or say you are for social justice or say you’re for free speech and not have to pay a price for it,” Obama said during a speech at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, on Thursday.
The two-term former Democratic president painted a picture of the Trump White House looking to upend the international order created after the second world war – and a domestic political reconfiguration in which ideological disagreement falling within mutual respect for free speech and the rule of law being eroded.
“It is up to all of us to fix this,” Obama said, including “the citizen, the ordinary person who says, ‘No, that’s not right.’”
Obama said he disagreed with some of the president’s economic policies, including widespread new tariffs. But the former president said he is “more deeply concerned with a federal government that threatens universities if they don’t give up students who are exercising their right to free speech”.
That referred to decisions by the Trump administration to pull federal funding for top universities unless they agreed to abandon student diversity programs and implement guidelines on what it considered to be the line between legitimate protest in support of Palestine and antisemitism.
Obama also said schools and students should review campus environments around issues of academic freedom and to be prepared to lose government funding in their defense.
“If you are a university, you may have to figure out, ‘Are we, in fact, doing things right?’” he said during the conversation at Hamilton College. “Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?
“If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, ‘That’s why we got this big endowment.’”
Columbia University, in New York, has become the centerpiece of administration efforts to crack down via federal funding on what it contends were campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war that strayed into antisemitism.
Federal immigration agents have arrested and sought to deport one graduate student that they claimed he violated immigration rules by engaging in pro-Palestine demonstrations. Another student sued after immigration agents tried to arrest and deport her after she also engaged in such demonstrations.
The university agreed to make policy changes, including hiring security officers with arrest powers and banning protests in academic buildings, after the Trump administration stripped it of $400m in federal grants. The administration says it may now reinstate the money.
Harvard, Princeton University and other institutions are also under federal funding review over their policies on the issue.
“Now we’re at one of those moments where, you know what? It’s not enough just to say you’re for something; you may actually have to do something,” Obama said.
The former president went on to question deals between corporate law firms and the administration after they were hit by executive orders over their connection to attorneys involved in prosecution efforts against Trump during Joe Biden’s presidency – or for representing the current administration’s political opponents.
“It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me or a whole bunch of my predecessors,” Obama said, going on to question a decision by the White House to restrict access of the Associated Press to official events over the news agency’s decision to reject Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.