MSNBC hosts found former President Barack Obama’s remarks at the Democratic National Convention difficult to watch.
Reacting to the third night of DNC speeches, network hosts Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid said the former president’s pessimistic remarks were “hard to watch,” which they interpreted as a warning that President Trump’s reelection could mean the “end of American democracy.”
“President Obama’s speech tonight slayed me. I’m sure people will have different opinions about it because it’s a different kind of thing from him. But his warnings we could potentially be at the end of American democracy scared me, and I found upsetting and hard to watch. But it’s powerful. Powerful stuff,” Maddow said.
Reid said she shared Maddow’s reaction to Obama’s speech, speculating that Obama, whom she describes as a “poet,” purposefully used that rhetorical tone to forewarn about the consequences of the election.
“He’s a writer, so he speaks like a writer, and he participates in writing his speeches, which is unusual for a politician. And he has this very poetic and very, almost dramatic, sort of sense. That was not the kind of speech he gave tonight. This was President Obama saying, ‘I sat in that office, and I want you to listen to me because I’m warning you, because I know it from inside the job that there’s a danger here,'” Reid said. “This was the speech that Obama has given throughout all of the speeches I’ve read or watched that absolutely did feel like the most of a warning. And I think it was warning about the potential end of America.”
Reid said that it “seemed dramatic” but defended the tone by arguing if Trump “breaks every institution that made it possible for there to be a Barack Obama, it will end.”
