Obama slams Trump’s election ‘hooey,’ warns of GOP’s ‘further delegitimizing of our democracy’

Former President Barack Obama warned Monday that Americans will see “a further delegitimizing of our democracy” if the Republican Party’s election reform efforts aren’t stopped.

During a virtual fundraiser for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., Mr. Obama criticized former President Donald Trump for making up “a whole bunch of hooey” about voter fraud in the November election and sowing doubt in the American public about the legitimacy of President Biden’s electoral win.

“In this election, what we saw was my successor, the former president, violate that core tenet that you count the votes and then declare a winner, and fabricate and make up a whole bunch of hooey,” Mr. Obama said, according to a clip of the call played on CNN’s “Don Lemon Tonight.”

The former president continued, “So that as bad as January 6 was, if we had to repeat in future elections in which, let’s say, the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature decided, ’We’re not going to certify all those votes coming out of Philadelphia because we think that those urban votes are shady,’ imagine what would have happened. We would have had a worse constitutional crisis than we did.”

Mr. Obama said he’s confident the Senate will hold a new vote on the For the People Act, a sweeping election and voting law that failed in the Senate last week after Republicans denied Democrats the 60 votes needed to begin debate under Senate rules. Without federal action, the former president said, America is faced with “major strategies” by Republicans “to reduce the impact of universal suffrage,” The Hill reported.

“If we don’t stop these kinds of efforts now, [what] we are going to see is more and more contested elections — contested not in the sense of healthy competition but contested in terms of who wins, who loses,” Mr. Obama reportedly said.

“We are going to see a further delegitimizing of our democracy. And not only are we going to see more unfairness in terms of results and who is represented and who isn’t, but we are going to see a breakdown of the basic agreement that has held this magnificent democratic experiment together,” he said, The Hill reported.