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Former President Barack Obama scolded Hispanic voters during a conversation with podcast host and comedian Marc Maron published Monday for supporting President Donald Trump in 2024 due to inflation concerns.
Obama said the country and its progressive wing were being “tested” right now. The former president said he and Maron were part of a generation that saw things get better with time, but said their positions were never really tested.
“It was easy, I think, to say, well, yeah, I’m a progressive. But it didn’t really cost us anything,” the former president said.
“We could take positions on things that we thought were correct, but they were never really tested,” he added. “We’re being tested right now. I think people, and that includes young people, understand there are consequences to the choices that we’re making. If you decide not to vote, that’s a consequence. If you are a Hispanic man, and you’re frustrated about inflation and so you decided, eh, you know what, all that rhetoric about Trump doesn’t matter, I’m just mad about inflation. And now, your sons are being stopped in LA because they look Latino. That’s a test.”
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Former President Barack Obama participates in a book talk with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel at The Anthem on December 02, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“There’s some clarity that’s coming about right now that I wish it’d be great if we weren’t tested this way, but you know what, we probably need to be shaken out of our complacency anyway,” Obama said.
Obama made a similar argument during a conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson, according to The New York Times, in June.
The former Democratic president said during remarks in Connecticut that liberals “felt comfortable in their righteousness” during his presidency because it wasn’t challenged.
“You could be as progressive and socially conscious as you wanted, and you did not have to pay a price,” he said.
“You could still make a lot of money. You could still hang out in Aspen and Milan and travel and have a house in the Hamptons and still think of yourself as a progressive,” Obama said. “We now have a situation in which all of us are going to be tested in some way, and we are going to have to decide what our commitments will be.”
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Former U.S. president Barack Obama listens to speakers on a panel at the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum, one month after the Democrats’ loss in the U.S. presidential election, in Chicago, Illinois, Dec. 5, 2024. (Vincent Alban/Reuters)
Obama said during the June event that things were different.
“You might lose some of your donors if you’re a university and if you’re a law firm, your billings might drop a little bit, which means you cannot remodel that kitchen in your house in the Hamptons this summer,” he said.
Maron revealed in June that he was retiring his podcast, “WTF with Marc Maron,” which had been airing for 16 years. He told CNN in August, “I don’t want to chase the cultural conversation through clickbait and garbage. You know, I don’t want to be tethered.”
Obama was his final guest.
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Comedian and podcaster Marc Maron. (Matt Winkelmeyer/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images)
Maron told the network that he never intended for the show to be about politics, and felt that it had run its course.
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During the podcast, Maron and Obama discussed Maron’s viral observation that liberals had been so irritating that they had “annoyed America into fascism” by electing Trump again. Obama pointed out he said a few years ago that progressives couldn’t just act like scolds “all the time.”
Fox News’ Gabriel Hays contributed to this report.
