Former President Barack Obama issued a stark warning about the state of American politics after conservative figure Charlie Kirk was fatally shot, calling the moment a “political crisis of the sort that we haven't seen before.”

On Tuesday (September 16), Obama appeared at an event in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he described Kirk's killing as "horrific and a tragedy" despite not knowing the conservative activist personally and "disagreeing with many of his views."

Obama appeared to call out President Donald Trump for promoting division following Kirk's shooting.

“I think at moments like this, when tensions are high, part of the job of the president is to pull people together,” Obama said. “We have to respect other people’s right to say things that we profoundly disagree with.”

The former president also praised Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox and Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro for modeling how leaders can disagree without inciting division. Cox has shown “that it is possible for us to disagree while abiding by a basic code of how we should engage in public debate," Obama said.

“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 continued.

The former president noted that after the 2015 mass shooting by a white supremacist at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, he didn't attack his political opponents. He also cited President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 remarks, saying Bush “explicitly went out of his way to say, ‘We are not at war against Islam.’”

The White House fired back at Obama’s remarks, calling him the “architect of modern political division.”

“Obama used every opportunity to sow division and pit Americans against each other. His division has inspired generations of Democrats to slander their opponents as ‘deplorables,’ or ‘fascists,’ or ‘Nazis,’” a White House spokesperson said in a statement.

Kirk, 31, was fatally shot on September 10 while speaking at Utah Valley University. Trump allies have largely blamed “left-wing rhetoric” for Kirk’s death, and some, including Vice President JD Vance, have called for public exposure of anyone who condoned or mocked the killing.

“This is not normal,” Obama said. “And the longer we treat it as normal, the deeper the damage becomes.”

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Stan Bell