|
Obama Rips Abbott on Jade Helm Fears
and Decries Texas Guard Illinois Deploy
Texas Troops Were Sent to Chicago on a Lie
Obama Says Democracy on Ballot with Prop 50
Capitol Inside
October 14, 2025
Barack Obama portrayed Governor Greg Abbott as a shameless hypocrite who's a significant threat to democracy in America this week in a scathing critique of the Texas National Guard deployment to the Chicago area in a purely partisan power play.
Obama, a former state senator and U.S. Senate member from Illinois, took aim at the Lone Star State on a separate front on Monday when he served up an enthusiastic endorsement for the California ballot initiative Proposition 50 that's designed to counter the Republican's congressional redistricting effort in Texas.
Obama slammed the Texas Republican leader in an interview on Marc Maron's podcast WTF on Sunday when he took a shot at U.S. Senator Ted Cruz as well. The Democrat who served as the president for eight years before Donald Trump's first term suggested that Abbott and other Republicans would have gone bezerk if he would have endorsed the shuffling of National Guard troops to red states and cities under the guise of law-and-order.
"If I had sent in the National Guard into Texas and just said, ‘you know what, a lot of problems in Dallas, you know, a lot of crime there, and I don't care what Governor Abbott says, I'm going to kind of take over law enforcement because I think things are out of control,' It is mind boggling to me how Fox News would have responded," Obama said in the discussion with the actor and comedian who's the podcast host.
Obama noted that he was the president in 2015 when Abbott took the bait on right-wing conspiracy theories about the Jade Helm 15 training exercises that special ops forces from the U.S. military conducted in Texas during his first year on the job as governor.
Some conservatives feared that the Obama White House was using the training operation as a front for a clandestine mission that would culminate in federal agents rounding up and holding political prisoners in abandoned WalMart buildings in rural locations. So Abbott
ordered the Texas Guard to monitor the U.S. armed forces for the ostensible sake of protecting the constitutional rights, private property and individual liberty of the people he was elected to represent if the far-right concerns were real.
"Ted Cruz and a number of other folks were out there lending credence to the fact that I was preparing for, you know, the whole black helicopter, one world government," Obama told Maron. "I was about to take over Texas."
Obama joined a growing chorus of Abbott critics with his condemnation of the Texas governor's authorization of National Guard troops to patrol the streets of other American cities. Oklahoma Republican Kevin Stitt ripped the Texas Guard deployment to Illinois as an act that GOP loyalists would have seen as treasonous if the Democrats were still in charge.
"Abbott and I sued the Biden administration when the shoe was on the other foot and the Biden administration was trying to force us to vaccinate all of our soldiers and force masks across the country," Stitt said last week. "As a federalist believer, one governor against another governor, I don't think that's the right way to approach this."
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and officials there have taken Texas to court to keep the Texas National Guard out of the Windy City and other parts of their state. A federal judge blocked the use of the Texas troops in Chicago for two weeks but allowed them to remain outside the city in Illinois. A similar deployment appears to be in the making with Portland as the next destination.
Obama depicted the Abbott maneuvering as un-American behavior. “I think there is no doubt that a lot of the norms, civic habits, expectations, institutional guardrails that we had, that we took for granted for our democracy have been weakened deliberately,” Obama said. “And I don’t think they’re destroyed, but I think they have been damaged. And they’ve been systematic about it.”
more to come ...
| 
