Obama: Leaders who 'feed fear typically are also ones who avoid facts'

Obama, who has largely refrained from weighing in on the Trump administration since leaving office in 2017, spoke on Saturday at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, for a celebration of Nelson Mandela's birthday.

Trump has made more than 10,000 false or misleading claims, according to The Washington Post.

For his part, Obama said he changes his mind "all the time, based on facts and evidence."

"The challenge we have in our politics in every country is when people start conforming facts to their opinions and biases as opposed to trying to shape their opinions and biases based on the facts," Obama said.

He said: "If you don't know what you stand for and what your values are and what you believe, then you also don't know what can be compromised and what can't be compromised."

Obama also commented on what he described as society's "struggle between hope and fear."

"There is always a struggle between hope and fear, between the world as it is and how we'd like it to be," he said. "And during times of tumult and disruption, whether it's technological, economic, information, migration -- the danger of us resorting to fear, to organize ourselves, falling back on tribe, race, ethnicity, sectarian lines, that always becomes stronger."

"The good news is that fear is typically the province of the old, and hope is the province of the young."