Former President Barack Obama criticized Hispanic voters for backing President Trump in 2024 over inflation concerns during a podcast with comedian Marc Maron.
On Monday’s episode, Obama said the nation—and its progressive movement—are being “tested,” noting that while his generation saw steady progress, they were never truly challenged in their beliefs.
“It was easy, I think, to say, well, yeah, I’m a progressive. But it didn’t really cost us anything,” the former president said. “We could take positions on things that we thought were correct, but they were never really tested. We’re being tested right now. I think people, and that includes young people, understand there are consequences to the choices that we’re making. If you decide not to vote, that’s a consequence. If you are a Hispanic man, and you’re frustrated about inflation and so you decided, eh, you know what, all that rhetoric about Trump doesn’t matter, I’m just mad about inflation. And now, your sons are being stopped in LA because they look Latino. That’s a test.”
“There’s some clarity that’s coming about right now that I wish it’d be great if we weren’t tested this way, but you know what, we probably need to be shaken out of our complacency anyway,” Obama said.
According to The New York Times, Obama made a similar point in June during a talk with historian Heather Cox Richardson, saying liberals “felt comfortable in their righteousness” during his presidency because their views were never seriously challenged.
“You could be as progressive and socially conscious as you wanted, and you did not have to pay a price,” said Obama. “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.”
During the June event, Obama claimed that things were different, adding: “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.”
During the podcast, Maron and Obama discussed Maron’s viral remark that liberals had “annoyed America into fascism” by helping re-elect Trump. Obama agreed, noting he’d previously warned that progressives couldn’t go around acting like scolds “all the time.”
Maron announced in June that he was ending his 16-year run of the WTF with Marc Maron podcast. He told CNN in August he no longer wanted to “chase the cultural conversation through clickbait and garbage.” He added that the show was never meant to focus on politics and had simply run its course — with Obama as his final guest.
Obama appears as the guest on the finale of Marc Maron’s podcast, where he boasts about offending the left with his “old-fashion values” right before defending the transing of children pic.twitter.com/GPFvO4J9xW
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) October 13, 2025
Barack Obama slams President Trump for deploying masked ICE agents to deport illegal immigrants, saying “that’s not our idea of America.”
He says the use of armed men patrolling the streets and warns against Kangaroo courts targeting political opponents.
Obama tells Trump to… pic.twitter.com/CDa2grtVvk
— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) October 14, 2025
