Former President Barack Obama is back on the lecture circuit, and according to him, it is the right that owns the “mean, angry, exclusive, us/them” brand of politics.
In a recent interview with progressive podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen, Obama claimed, “The other side does the mean, angry, you know, exclusive, us/them, you know, divisive politics. That’s their, that’s, that’s their home court. Our court is coming together.”
That is a remarkable statement given the last several years of political reality.
In 2024, President Trump did not squeak by. He won decisively. All seven swing states, the popular vote, a sweeping electoral college victory, and Republicans took both the House and Senate. That is not the profile of a fringe, “exclusive” minority clinging to power. That is a majority of voters sending a message.
Yet somehow, in Obama’s telling, it is conservatives who specialize in division.
Let’s examine that. If you support a secure border, you are labeled a xenophobe. If you oppose DEI policies or racial preferences, you are branded a racist. If you question radical gender ideology being pushed on children, you are called transphobic. If you want voter ID and basic election safeguards, you are smeared as an election denier. If you declined the COVID vaccine, you were dismissed as anti science.
Those are not isolated insults. That has been the dominant tone of progressive activism for years.
Obama pointed to a halftime show as an example of unity, saying it “wasn’t preaching” but “demonstrating and displaying, this is what a community is.” Meanwhile, conservatives have been deplatformed, fired, and in some cases physically attacked for expressing mainstream political views.
Piers Morgan, hardly a right wing bomb thrower, called Obama’s remarks “Preposterously disingenuous nonsense,” arguing that “The woke left has been the single meanest, angriest, exclusive, us/them divisive movement in history.”
There is also the matter of Obama’s separate comments accusing ICE agents of being “rogue” and “dangerous.” In a climate where federal officers have already faced harassment and threats, that kind of rhetoric does not exactly cool tensions.
It is easy to accuse your opponents of division. It is harder to acknowledge how your own side contributes to it.
If unity means agreement with progressive orthodoxy, that is not unity. That is conformity.
The country just delivered a clear electoral verdict. Pretending that millions of Americans are driven by anger and exclusion, rather than policy disagreements, may make for a tidy podcast clip. It does not match the lived experience of a deeply divided nation that is tired of being caricatured.
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