Former US President Barack Obama, left, delivers his speech at the 16th Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture at the Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo / AP
Former US President Barack Obama, left, delivers his speech at the 16th Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture at the Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo / AP
US President Donald Trump loudly and repeatedly complained as he travelled to Belgium, Britain, Scotland and Finland over the past week that the continent's immigration policies are ripping apart the "fabric of Europe" and destroying its culture.
After meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump sat down with Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
This was a central theme of the interview, which aired yesterday. Carlson, who routinely pushes strongly anti-immigrant messages on his programme, egged on the President: "As you travelled around Europe and looked at Europe over the years, can you think of a place that has been improved by mass immigration?"
"Not one," said Trump. "In fact, one of my big things - and some people were insulted . . . I said the immigration policies in Europe are a disaster. You're destroying Europe. You're destroying the culture of Europe . . . The culture is changing rapidly, and the crime rate is changing more than rapidly. You better do something. I told them that."
Carlson then asked whether Putin or German Chancellor Angela Merkel is doing "a better job representing the interests of their countries."
Trump responded by attacking Merkel. "Angela was a superstar until she allowed millions of people to come into Germany," he said. "That really hurt her badly, as you know. She was unbeatable in any election.
"I don't want to say who is better and who is not, but I will say this: She's been very badly hurt by immigration. Very, very badly."
Trump then praised China, Japan and South Korea for not allowing refugees or mass immigration into their countries. "We have the worst laws anywhere in the world," the President said. "We have the worst immigration laws in the world. We don't have any law."
Speaking in South Africa yesterday to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's birth, former President Barack Obama also spoke about culture and immigration.
US President Donald Trump waves to members of the media as he walks towards the West Wing of the White House in Washington. Photo / AP
Watching Trump's interview back-to-back with Obama's address offers a jarring contrast and spotlights the enormous gulf that exists between the two most recent men to occupy the Oval Office.
It also highlights the degree to which the post-World War II "Washington consensus," as it was once known, has shattered in the Trump era.
Obama began by noting that Europe's culture of yore isn't all that it's cracked up to be. When Mandela was born, for example, "The dominant European powers . . . viewed this continent and its people primarily as spoils in a contest for territory and abundant natural resources and cheap labour. And the inferiority of the black race, an indifference towards black culture and interests and aspirations, was a given."
Speaking to a crowd of 15,000 in Johannesburg, Obama said Mandela changed history because he cultivated a healthy political culture after he was released from prison, pursuing reconciliation with his former captors in the wake of Apartheid.
"He understood it's not just about who has the most votes. It's also about the civic culture that we build that makes democracy work," Obama said.
.@BarackObama talks about the “utter loss of shame among political leaders”, who when they’re caught lying, “just double down and lie some more” pic.twitter.com/7gOS4Iiaag
"Democracy depends on strong institutions, and it's about minority rights and checks and balances, and freedom of speech and freedom of expression and a free press, and the right to protest and petition the government, and an independent judiciary and everybody having to follow the law."
Obama spoke about being inspired as a university student by Mandela, who was then confined at Robben Island in South Africa. As a law student at Harvard, the future president recalled feeling a wave of hope wash over his heart on the day Mandela emerged from prison. The first African American president noted that Mandela never stopped being proud of his tribal heritage.
"Embracing our common humanity does not mean that we have to abandon our unique ethnic and national and religious identities," Obama said.
"He didn't stop being proud of being a black man and being a South African. But he believed, as I believe, that you can be proud of your heritage without denigrating those of a different heritage. In fact, you dishonour your heritage.
"It would make me think that you're a little insecure about your heritage if you've got to put somebody else's heritage down. . . . Don't you get a sense sometimes . . . that these people who are so intent on putting people down, and puffing themselves up, that they're small-hearted? That there's something they're just afraid of?"
Trump has not visited Africa as president, and he's refused to apologise for describing African nations as "shithole countries."
He reportedly blew up at members of his national security team during a meeting last year when he learned the numbers of immigrants who had been given visas to enter the United States.
The 40,000 visas given to Nigerians especially bothered Trump. Once they had seen America, they would never "go back to their huts" in Africa, Trump said in the Oval Office, according to the New York Times. The White House denied it. The Administration has also scaled back US efforts to combat HIV/Aids.
Before he took office, Trump spent years falsely insisting that Obama was really from Kenya and demanding more and more proof that the then-president was born in Hawaii. Obama spent two days in Kenya on his way to South Africa, including a visit to the small hilltop village - right on the equator - where his absentee father grew up.
Trump said on Fox that his European tour has given him a fresh sense of urgency to build a border wall and reduce the number of immigrants allowed into the US. "Democrats are for open borders," the current President said. "Maybe it's a political philosophy that they grew up with. Maybe they learned it at school. Maybe they're fools. I don't know."
Obama squarely addressed this straw man and took a shot at Trump's family separation policy.
"It's not wrong to insist that national borders matter," the former president said. "Laws need to be followed. In the public realm, newcomers should make an effort to adapt to the language and customs of their new home. Those are legitimate things, and we have to be able to engage people who do feel as if things are not orderly.
"But that can't be an excuse for immigration policies based on race, or ethnicity or religion. There's got to be some consistency. And we can enforce the law while respecting the essential humanity of those who are striving for a better life. For a mother with a child in her arms, we can recognise that could be somebody in our family, that could be my child."
The two presidents also took contrasting positions on the importance of alliances for the US.
On Fox, Trump criticised Nato extensively.
Carlson brought up the hypothetical of Montenegro being attacked by Russia: "Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack? Why is that?"
"I understand what you're saying," Trump replied. "I've asked the same question. Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people. ... They have very aggressive people. They may get aggressive and, 'Congratulations, you're in World War III.' . . . That's the way it was set up."
Obama took the opposite tack.
He said the present moment demands more alliances and cooperation, not less.
"The countries which rely on rabid nationalism and xenophobia and doctrines of tribal, racial or religious superiority as their main organising principle - the thing that holds people together - eventually those countries find themselves consumed by civil war or external war. Check the history books," Obama said.
"Technology cannot be put back in a bottle, so we're stuck with the fact that we now live close together and populations are going to be moving, and environmental challenges are not going to go away on their own, so that the only way to effectively address problems like climate change or mass migration or pandemic disease will be to develop systems for more international cooperation, not less."
While Obama carefully avoided mentioning Trump by name during his speech on foreign soil, Trump has directly blamed Obama for the Russian interference in the 2016 election (when he's acknowledged it happened).
"I wasn't president when this happened," he said on Fox. "Barack Obama was the president of the United States . . . and they informed him of it, and he did nothing. And then after I won, see, he thought Hillary was going to win, after I won, he said, 'Oh, this is a big deal.' Well, it wasn't a big deal as long as she won. So it's a disgrace, and frankly, it's a disgrace what's happening to our country."
With his Nelson Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg on Tuesday, Barack Obama offered the sharpest possible contrast between himself and his successor—between statesman and demagogue. https://t.co/jKxSTL2Atm
Obama did not address the Russian interference, but he did criticise leaders who "lie" and attack the free press.
"People just make stuff up," he said in South Africa. "We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they're caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more. It used to be that if you caught them lying, they'd be like, 'Oh, man.' Now they just keep on lying."
The former president situated Trump's unexpected 2016 victory as just one symptom of a larger global backlash to the forces of globalisation, democratisation and liberalisation.
"Russia, already humiliated by its reduced influence since the collapse of the Soviet Union, feeling threatened by democratic movements along its borders, suddenly started reasserting authoritarian control and in some cases meddling with its neighbours," Obama said.
"Within the United States, within the European Union, challenges to globalisation first came from the left but then came more forcefully from the right, as you started seeing populist movements . . . tap the unease that was felt by many people who lived outside of the urban cores; fears that economic security was slipping away, that their social status and privileges were eroding, that their cultural identities were being threatened by outsiders, somebody that didn't look like them or sound like them or pray as they did."
He said the 2008 financial crisis supercharged these trends: "And a politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment began to appear, and that kind of politics is now on the move. It's on the move at a pace that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago.
"I am not being alarmist, I am simply stating the facts. Look around. Strongman politics are ascendant suddenly, whereby elections and some pretense of democracy are maintained - the form of it - but those in power seek to undermine every institution or norm that gives democracy meaning.
"In the West, you've got far-right parties that often times are based not just on platforms of protectionism and closed borders, but also on barely hidden racial nationalism."
Obama said the human race now finds itself at "a crossroads" and faces a consequential choice between two visions for humanity's future. He warned that the world is "threatening to return to an older, a more dangerous, a more brutal way of doing business."
"So we have to start by admitting that whatever laws may have existed on the books, whatever wonderful pronouncements existed in constitutions, whatever nice words were spoken during these last several decades at international conferences or in the halls of the United Nations, the previous structures of privilege and power and injustice and exploitation never completely went away," Obama said.
"They were never fully dislodged. Caste differences still impact the life chances of people on the Indian subcontinent. Ethnic and religious differences still determine who gets opportunity from the Central Europe to the Gulf.
"It is a plain fact that racial discrimination still exists in both the United States and South Africa. . . . In other words, for far too many people, the more things have changed, the more things stayed the same."
