Barack Obama spent years telling the world America needed to be fundamentally transformed.
Now, with the nation’s 250th birthday right around the corner, he’s back at it.
And what he just said about George Washington and the Founding Fathers has a whole lot of Americans fuming.
In a recent interview with MSNOW, Obama called out George Washington by name as a slaveholder and described the men who built this republic as carrying a “profound deep flaw.” The timing was not accidental. The rest of the country was gearing up for one of the biggest patriotic celebrations in American history, and Obama decided to use the moment to relitigate 1776.
“I think sometimes we get confused in thinking that these two stories are separate. They’re intertwined, right? Which is why it’s possible for me to be a great admirer of George Washington, and also acknowledge he was a slaveholder,” Obama told the interviewer.
He kept going.
“That does not negate [Washington’s] greatness, it simply acknowledges that there’s a profound deep flaw in these Founding Fathers who were also geniuses and gave us these tools,” Obama said. “It’s that we’re this mixed bag, we’ve got contradictions. And embody the country’s contradictions.”
This wasn’t the first shot Obama fired at the Founders this month. Earlier in June, at the grand opening of his presidential center on Chicago’s South Side, Obama stood before a crowd that included former presidents and Hollywood celebrities and declared that the Founders “fell terribly short of the Declaration’s promise, leaving slavery intact, allowing states to restrict the franchise to white men who owned property.”
He did acknowledge their “foresight” and “genius” in drafting a Constitution and Bill of Rights. But the framing was unmistakable. The birthday party for the greatest republic in human history, and Obama wanted to make sure everyone remembered what he thinks the guests of honor got wrong.
The presidential center itself is worth a word. The sprawling campus in Chicago’s Jackson Park includes a museum, a library branch, community programming, and what amounts to a monument to Obama’s own political legacy. The opening drew enormous press coverage and has been years in the making, with the cost reportedly ballooning well past initial projections. Obama has been doing a media tour around the opening, and the Founders have apparently been a recurring theme.
But here’s what gets glossed over every time this kind of lecture gets delivered. The men Obama is criticizing didn’t just talk about liberty. They staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor on it, as the Declaration itself put it. Many of them knew slavery was a moral catastrophe even while they failed to abolish it at the founding. The constitutional architecture they built, the amendment process, the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, that is exactly what made abolition possible 80 years later. Women’s suffrage. Civil rights. Every great expansion of American liberty ran through the machinery those men designed in Philadelphia.
That’s not a record of falling short. That’s a record of building something durable enough to correct its own worst failures across generations.
And the timing here matters more than Obama’s team probably wants to admit. President Donald Trump has leaned into the semiquincentennial with genuine enthusiasm, treating it as a moment of national pride and celebration. The contrast wrote itself. One president built his legacy around honoring what America accomplished. The other built a billion-dollar campus in Chicago and used the ribbon-cutting to scold the Founders in front of Oprah and Steven Spielberg.
The left-wing media will frame Obama’s comments as nuanced and historically honest. Maybe some of it is. Slavery was a monstrous institution, and no serious person disputes that. The Founders who owned slaves carried a genuine moral failure, and acknowledging that isn’t radical.
What is worth questioning is the pattern. Obama has now done this twice in the same month, in two high-profile settings, right before the nation’s biggest birthday. At some point, “nuance” starts to look a lot like a talking point. The country is 250 years old. It survived a Civil War that killed 600,000 people to settle the question Obama keeps raising. It passed a 13th Amendment. A 14th. A 15th. It enacted the Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. The work of making the union more perfect, as Obama himself put it, has been going on for two and a half centuries.
Americans know their history is complicated. They don’t need a lecture about it during the birthday party.
What’s striking is that Obama can’t seem to help himself. He’s a former two-term president with a new presidential center, a media platform, and a legacy that is entirely his own to define. But rather than spend the nation’s 250th talking about what America has built, he keeps returning to what it got wrong at the start. That says something about his priorities. It’s just not clear he realizes what it says.
The Founders handed the American people a document rooted in the conviction that rights come from God and not from government. They built a republic that has outlasted every empire that existed when they signed their names to that Declaration. George Washington could have made himself king. He didn’t. He went home to Mount Vernon. That choice alone separates him from virtually every revolutionary leader in world history.
None of that makes slavery acceptable. But it does make the relentless focus on the Founders’ failures, right now, in this moment, feel less like historical honesty and more like a habit Obama can’t break.
With America’s 250th birthday here, most of the country is celebrating. Fireworks, parades, flags on front porches. The kind of thing that used to unite Americans across every political line. Obama is free to keep raising the hard questions. But the rest of the country seems ready to mark the occasion with a little gratitude for what those flawed, extraordinary men actually built.
Sources: Fox News, WND News Center, Townhall