(CNN) — Barack Obama ripped into the law firms, universities and businesses that have worked out settlements or other deals with President Donald Trump’s administration, arguing that “We all have this capacity, I think, to take a stand.”
The former president said the organizations that concede to Trump should be able to say, “We’re not going to be bullied into saying that we can only hire people or promote people based on some criteria that’s been cooked up by Steve Miller,” referring to the top White House aide.
According to an advance podcast transcript, Obama said he sympathized with those looking to avoid a backlash, but said, “We’re not at the stage where you have to be like Nelson Mandela and be in a 10-by-12 jail cell for 27 years and break rocks.”
The comments, some of the most direct that Obama has made about Trump outside of his campaign trail appearances in 2020 and 2024, came in an interview posting Monday for the final episode of the “WTF” podcast hosted by comedian Marc Maron.
Maron, who last interviewed Obama in 2015, has frequently talked about that conversation in subsequent episodes. In July, after announcing he would end the 16-year run of the pioneering podcast, he suggested that another talk with Obama would be a dream way to finish. Last week, he got his wish — though not by having Obama make another visit to his house, as many of the podcast guests tend to.
Maron kept the interview a surprise even from fans, only teasing in his penultimate episode that he traveled to record it. They met in Obama’s office in Washington.
The conversation focused on the state of America and what Democrats can find hope in — but Obama also criticized progressive absolutism and singled out one rising Texas Democrat who impresses him.
The news out of his hometown on his mind, Obama called Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago “a deliberate end run around not just a concept, but a law that’s been around for a long time” — the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits the use of the military inside the US for law enforcement purposes.
“That is a genuine effort to weaken how we have understood democracy,” he said.
Obama reflected on his own experiences in the White House, including dealing with pushback from Republican leaders such as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
“If I had sent in the National Guard into Texas and just said, ‘You know what? A lot of problems in Dallas, a lot of crime there, and I don’t care what Gov. Abbott says. I’m going to kind of take over law enforcement, because I think things are out of control,’ it is mind-boggling to me how Fox News would have responded,” he said.
The two also discussed the evolution of the media environment, particularly around the podcast world Maron helped shape, and what it has done to political communication.
“It was interesting to me when people started criticizing Bernie [Sanders] or somebody else for going on Rogan. It’s like, why wouldn’t you? Yeah, of course, go,” Obama said, referring to “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.
Among the Rogan guests who caught Obama’s eye: Texas state Rep. James Talarico, who turned a viral appearance on the podcast into fuel for what has now become a competitive Senate primary run.
Obama called Talarico “terrific, a really talented young man,” adding that his appearance proves that going on long-form podcasts requires “a certain confidence in your actual convictions to debate and have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you.”
Overall, Obama argued, “what people long for is some core integrity that seems absent, just a sense that the person seems to walk the walk, just talk the talk.”
Obama said he particularly enjoyed a bit from Maron’s latest stand-up special when the comedian jokes that progressives annoyed the average American into fascism.
“You can’t constantly lecture people without acknowledging that you’ve got some blind spots too, and that life’s messy,” Obama said. “I think this was a fault of some progressive language, was almost asserting a holier-than-thou superiority that’s not that different from what we used to joke about coming from the right moral majority and a certain fundamentalism about how to think about stuff that I think was dangerous.”
“If I talked about trans issues, I wasn’t talking down to people and saying, ‘Oh, you’re a bigot,’” he said. “I’d say, ‘You know, it’s tough enough being a teenager. Let’s treat all kids decently. Why would we want to see kids bullied?”