During a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Tuesday, President Obama mocked Republican officials who denounced Donald Trump’s vulgar comments in a 2005 tape but who have not pulled their endorsement of the GOP nominee.
Obama told the crowd that Trump “says stuff that nobody would find tolerable if they were applying for a job at 7/11.”
“And the fact that now you’ve got people saying, ‘We’ll, we strongly disapprove, we really disagree, we find those comments disgusting, but we’re still endorsing him, we still think he should be president, that doesn’t make sense to me,” Obama said.
He noted that it may be possible to forgive someone for the things the say, but that it doesn’t mean that person should be president.
“You can’t have it both ways here. You can’t repeatedly denounce what is said by someone and then say, ‘But I’m still gonna endorse them to be the most powerful person on the planet’ and to put them in charge,” Obama said. “So I just want to make that point, because there are still a number of Republican elected officials, some of whom I know and I’m sure are embarrassed and say, ‘Wow, that was a really terrible thing he said,’ but they can’t bring themselves to say, ‘I can’t endorse this guy.’”
“And by the way, why’d it take so long for some of them to finally walk away? I mean, we saw this coming,” he continued. “He’s been saying really bad stuff for awhile now. What did you think? He was just gonna transform himself? I mean, I’m 55, it’s hard for me to change. I know at 70 it’s gonna be harder.”
Obama said that Trump’s comments about women in the 2005 tape were “not right.”
“You don’t have to be a husband or a father to hear what we heard just a few days ago and say, ‘That’s not right,’” he said. “You just have to be a decent human being to say that’s not right.”
