r/neoliberal • u/Sine_Fine_Belli NATO • 2d ago

News (US) Obama and Harris publicly rebuke Trump’s second-term actions

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/04/politics/obama-harris-rebuke-trump/index.html
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121

u/DraconianWolf George Soros 1d ago

Hope he starts "trolling" the media with talks of a third term so we can all claim Republicans are overreacting to an obvious joke

128

u/FartBarf6969 Niels Bohr 1d ago

Nah, lets not normalize the rhetoric. It would be funny for us but its also all Fox News need to do the "see? Both sides do it, what he is saying is normal" schtick.

26

u/miss_shivers 1d ago

The right way to do it is for Obama to make it an obvious joke.

97

u/Underyx 1d ago

“He’s not gonna make a third term legal cause he knows he’d just lose against me.” – based Obama, in my dreams

21

u/miss_shivers 1d ago

That's exactly the line. Nicely done.

1

u/k5berry 1d ago

Once it leaves Trump’s mouth, it is normalized. They don’t need a both sides to point to, the gravitational pull of Teflon Don is strong enough. So I think something low stakes like this is an example of where we can’t be obsessed with coloring within the lines out of fear we’ll ruin the image, because our playmate just took a shit on the paper.

And for a HOT take: if the judiciary bends the knee and finds Trump eligible for a third term… why not run Obama again if he is our best shot? Not that I want that, I actively beg it does not come to that. But if it came to that point and if it were our best shot, it wouldn’t just be OK to do it IMO, we’d have an imperative to do it. In a civic fantasy world, he could even run, win, make whatever changes are needed to ensure our democratic institutions are stronger, and then resign.

2

u/Mathdino 4h ago

I suspect that's a colder take than you think.

The reason we have term limits is to prevent a guy like Donald Trump from becoming a geriatric king, not to prevent a guy like Barack Obama from running a third time when he was still younger than George Washington was.

Of the modern slate of presidents, he's the only one I'd trust not to cling to power or wield it for personal gain. The biggest problems with his administration came from his staffers, who have already all moved on at this point (and who had a bit of Move Fast and Break Things syndrome themselves). But it's pretty clear his administration was still significantly more competent than Bush's, Trump's, or Biden's. And much less morally compromised.

So yeah, I'd be very happy with an Obama third term, but I acknowledge that if Obama's place in history were replaced by literally any other Democrat, then we'd be absolutely fucked. So I still support the 22nd Amendment overall.