Obama: The US is dangerously close to becoming an autocracy

 Barack Obama has warned America is “dangerously close” to slipping into an autocracy.

The former president issued a thinly veiled rebuke of Donald Trump over the apparent erosion of the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary and the right to protest.

Addressing a charity event in Connecticut on Tuesday, Mr Obama said that America was close to going “over the cliff” when it comes to undermining democratic norms.

The former president said: “If you follow regularly what is said by those who are in charge of the federal government right now, there is a weak commitment to what we understood — and not just my generation, at least since World War II — our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work.”

Speaking alongside Heather Cox Richardson, an anti-Trump writer and historian, Mr Obama stressed that democracy requires government workers and the Justice Department to uphold the US constitution.

“It requires them to take that oath seriously, and when that isn’t happening, we start drifting into something that is not consistent with American democracy,” he said. “It is consistent with autocracies. It is consistent with Hungary under Orban.”

He continued: “We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalising behavior like that. And we need people both outside government and inside government saying, ‘Let’s not go over that cliff because it’s hard to recover.’”

His comments come after Mr Trump’s immigration crackdown sparked a wave of protests across the country, and after several elected Democratic officials were detained by federal agents.

It is the second time in recent months Mr Obama has spoken out publicly against the policies of the Trump administration.

In March, the former president said he was “deeply concerned” by the government’s targeting of universities and law firms.

“That kind of behaviour is contrary to the basic compact we have as Americans,” he said.

In his talk at the Connecticut Forum, Mr Obama also took aim at liberals for being “comfortable in their righteousness” during his presidency, and warned that they now face having their values tested.

“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.

“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.

“Now things are a little 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.”