September 19, 2025
Obama Calls Out The White House’s ‘Mistake’ In Sparking Division Around Kirk’s Death
Barack Obama calls out the messaging from political leaders in wake of Charlie Kirk’s death.
Barack Obama is weighing in on the growing divisions following Charlie Kirk’s death, criticizing the White House for what he called a “mistake” in trying to pin blame by identifying an enemy.
Speaking at the Jefferson Educational Society in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 16, the former president warned the nation is “at an inflection point” amid a surge of political violence, citing the recent assassinations of Charlie Kirk and Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, CBS News reports.
“Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, what happened to Charlie Kirk was horrific and a tragedy… There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it,” Obama said. “The central premise of our democratic system is that we are allowed to disagree and have, sometimes, really contentious debates, without resorting to violence.”
Along with the rising political violence, Obama warned of “a host of larger trends that we have to be concerned about,” including leaders whose responses to Kirk’s assassination risk deepening national division.
“There’s been some confusion, I think, around this lately, and frankly, coming from the White House and some of the other positions of authority that suggest, even before we had determined who the perpetrator of this evil act was, that somehow we’re going to identify an enemy,” Obama said.
Though he didn’t name Trump, the 44th president’s comments came days after Trump blamed Kirk’s assassination on the “radical left.” Obama called the move a “mistake” that deepens America’s divisions.
“When I hear not just our current president, but his aides, who have a history of calling political opponents ‘vermin,’ enemies who need to be ‘targeted,’ that speaks to a broader problem that we have right now, and something that we’re going to have to grapple with – all of us,” he said.
“We’re going to suggest that somehow that enemy was at fault, and we are then going to use that as a rationale for trying to silence discussion around who we are as a country and what direction we should go. And that’s a mistake as well.”
Amid calls for a “divorce” between Republicans and Democrats from Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Vice President JD Vance, attributing Kirk’s death to “left-wing extremism,” Obama takes a different approach by reminding people about the “core values” of America’s democracy.
”Whether we’re Democrats, Republicans, independents, we have to recognize that on both sides, undoubtedly, there are people who are extremists and who say things that are contrary to what I believe are America’s core values,” he said.
“And I think at moments like this, when tensions are high, then part of the job of the president is to pull people together.” If not, then we land in a “political crisis of the sort that we haven’t seen before,” he added.
Obama continued to speak out after Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was canceled over his remarks on Trump’s response to Kirk’s death. Talking to X on Sept. 18, Obama called out the Trump administration for taking cancel culture to a “new and dangerous level” by having media figures fired or removed for saying things they don’t like.
”This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent — and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it,” he added.
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