Trevor Noah grills Barack Obama on "defund the police" in one of the former president's most insightful and revealing interviews

The Daily Beast

The most illuminating portion of Obama's virtual 32-minute Daily Show interview came when Noah asked about his recent comments criticizing the use of "defund the police" as a political slogan, which prompted backlash from progressives and Black Lives Matter activists. “The concern is that there may be potential allies out there that you lose and the issue always is, how do you get enough people to support your cause that you can actually institutionalize it and translate it into laws, structures and so forth?" Obama said, according to The Daily Beast. But Obama pushed back on the notion that he was trying to “chastise” Black Lives Matter, saying: “What? Hold on a second, I just spent the whole summer complimenting them. What are you talking about?’ ... I think that people assumed that somehow I was making an argument that that’s why we didn’t get a bigger Democratic majority,” Obama said. “That actually was not the point I was making.” Obama said he was trying to argue that a slogan like "defund the police" is too scary for people, including his mother-in-law-to support. “The concern in these debates is often, ‘Oh, are we just trying to make white people comfortable rather than speaking truth to power,’ right?” he added. “The issue to me is not making them comfortable. It is, can we be precise with our language enough that people who might be persuaded around that particular issue to make a particular change that gets a particular result that we want, what’s the best way for us to describe that?”