Days before the nation marks its 250th anniversary, former President Barack Obama chose the moment not to celebrate the republic but to relitigate its founding, calling the men who built it geniuses afflicted by a "profound deep flaw."
In a Sunday interview on MSNOW, Obama revisited a theme he has returned to throughout his post-presidency: that America's founding generation, for all its brilliance, cannot be separated from the institution of slavery. He paired the remarks with his recent speech at the opening of his presidential center in Chicago, where he told attendees that "the success of this experiment was never a given."
The timing is hard to miss. With the country's semiquincentennial arriving Saturday, Obama is using the milestone to deliver what Fox News Digital reported as "a more cautionary message about the state of American democracy." Fox News Digital reached out to Obama's office on Monday for additional comment.
In the MSNOW interview, Obama framed the nation's founding and its history of slavery as inseparable threads:
"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."
He continued, offering what he described as a balanced view, though the balance tilted in a familiar direction:
"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 added that Americans are "this mixed bag, we've got contradictions. And embody the country's contradictions."
The former president's defenders will note he called the founders "geniuses." Fair enough. But the headline from Obama's own remarks is the word "flaw", and the clear implication that the nation's birthday is as much an occasion for contrition as for gratitude.
Obama delivered a similar message at the dedication of the Barack Obama Presidential Center, which opened earlier this month on Chicago's South Side. In his speech there, he acknowledged the founders' shortcomings while crediting their foresight:
"In forming our union, 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. But in drafting a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, they did have the foresight, the genius, to provide us with a framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect."
The center itself has drawn scrutiny. The New York Post reported that the facility cost $850 million and was built in Chicago's historic Jackson Park on land previously set aside for public use. Unlike traditional presidential libraries, no government records will be stored on site and no National Archives staff will be present. The center is run privately by the nonprofit Obama Foundation rather than the National Archives and Records Administration.
Chicago architect Grahm Balkany told the Post: "Obama, of all people, should not be building a palace for himself, a fortress in the middle of a public park. It's just contrary to what I thought he believed in."
Tim Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, offered a more diplomatic concern: "It would be good for the country, especially in these times, if a new national museum with a nonpartisan mission to inform and educate about the Obama era were opening this week."
That distinction matters. A traditional presidential library serves the public record. A privately run center, however lavish, serves the legacy of the man who built it. When that man then uses the platform to lecture the country about democracy, the irony writes itself.
Obama's comments about the founders are not new. He has been making many media appearances leading up to and following the center's opening. The 44th president has long framed American history as a story of unfulfilled promise, a narrative that resonates with progressive audiences but strikes many conservatives as ingratitude dressed up as nuance.
The discovery that some of Obama's own white ancestors owned slaves has resurfaced periodically in political discourse. In 2007, then-Obama spokesman Bill Burton confirmed to the Associated Press that "while a relative owned slaves, another fought for the Union in the Civil War." The fact surfaced again in 2019 comments by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., though the specific content of McConnell's remarks was not detailed.
None of this disqualifies Obama from discussing slavery's legacy. But it does add a layer of complexity he rarely dwells on, that the moral compromises of the founding era were not confined to the men who signed the Declaration. They ran through the bloodlines of millions of Americans, including his own.
Obama has faced criticism before for the gap between his public moralizing and his private conduct. Radio host Charlamagne tha God called Obama a hypocrite for criticizing others' private behavior while maintaining his own carefully curated public image.
What Obama is doing is a choice. Every public figure who addresses the nation's founding makes a choice about emphasis. You can acknowledge slavery's horror and still lead with the radical, world-changing idea that all men are created equal, an idea that, as Obama himself conceded, gave future generations the tools to expand liberty. Or you can lead with the flaw and treat the genius as a footnote.
Obama consistently chooses the former framing in his prepared texts and the latter in his off-the-cuff interviews. The MSNOW appearance leaned hard into the "deep flaw" language. The presidential center speech was more carefully balanced. The difference tells you something about where his instincts land when the teleprompter is off.
The former president has also made personal admissions in recent months that suggest a willingness to engage in public reflection. But reflection about one's own shortcomings is different from using a national birthday to catalog the founders' sins.
On April 18, Obama visited a pre-K program in the Bronx. Earlier this month, former presidents and Hollywood elites gathered for his center's opening ceremony in Chicago. He has been everywhere, on camera, on stage, on message. The message is consistent: America's story is one of contradiction, and the contradiction deserves as much attention as the achievement.
The presidential center sits on Chicago's South Side, where Obama launched his political career. It includes a museum, a library branch, and community programming. By any measure, it is an ambitious project. But its unusual structure, no archived records, no NARA oversight, private nonprofit control, raises questions about whom it ultimately serves.
Reports of tension in Obama's personal life have also drawn attention in recent months, adding a human dimension to the public persona of a man who has spent two decades positioning himself as the nation's moral conscience.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump spoke at a rally on the National Mall on June 24 to kick off the Great American State Fair, a celebration that, whatever its critics may say, did not open with a critique of the men who made the celebration possible.
Obama is right that the founders were imperfect. Every honest person knows that. The question is whether a former president, speaking from an $850 million privately funded monument to his own legacy, is the right messenger for that lesson, and whether the eve of the nation's 250th birthday is the right moment to deliver it.
The founders did not claim perfection. They claimed self-governance. They built a system designed to be improved by the people who inherited it. That system produced the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the franchise, and, eventually, the election of Barack Obama himself.
Obama acknowledged as much in his prepared remarks. But the sound bite that travels is "deep flaw." And sound bites, in politics, are choices.
Most Americans turning 250 would rather hear "happy birthday" than a lecture about their flaws. The founders, flawed as they were, would probably agree.