During a speech on the economy in Indiana on Wednesday, President Obama tore into Donald Trump and the Republicans’ plans to fix the American economy.
The President criticized Trump calls to deport undocumented immigrants and promises of better trade deals.
“That will not help us win,” Obama said. “That is not going to make your lives better. That will help people like him.”
In an allusion to Trump, Obama told the audience not to “fall for a bunch of okey doke just because you know it sounds funny or the tweets are provocative.”
“When I hear working families thinking’ about voting for those plans, then I want to have an intervention,” he said.
Obama said that Trump’s “fantasy” of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants “wouldn’t do anything to help the middle class.”
During his speech, Obama mostly avoided using Trump’s name, and later explained why he did so in a PBS town hall.
“He seems to do a good job mention his own name,” Obama replied when asked why he doesn’t use the real estate mogul’s name. “I’ll let him do his advertising for him.”
During the town hall, the President said he understood why Americans were angry and unhappy with the state of the economy, but he argued that Trump won’t be able to fix it.
“Even though we’ve recovered, people feel like the ground under their feet isn’t quite as solid,” he said. “And in those circumstances, a lot of times it’s easy for somebody to come up and say, ‘You know what? If we deport all the immigrants and build a wall; or if we cut off trade with China; or if we do x or y or z,’ some simple answer, and suddenly, everything’s going to feel secure.”
He also tore into Trump’s talking points on free trade.
“When somebody says, like the person you just mentioned who I’m not going to advertise for, that he’s going to bring all those jobs back, well, how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do? There’s no answer to it,” Obama said at the town hall. “He just says, ‘I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is he doesn’t have an answer.”
Very clever on the part of the President. Trump is as distractable as a two year old.
By having Trump fire his Twitter guns at Obama (and you know he’ll respond), it deflects his attention from Hillary.
He’s beginning to ramp it up. I think he’s going to be very articulate and effective when he finally does commit to endorsing Hillary. Then Donald, not knowing who to punch back at, is gonna really be flailing wildly. It will be a thing of beauty to see the Donald lose his shit in a very public way.
I saw Trump threatening to go after Obama if he were attacked, and thinking about it I’d say that’s a very solid piece of the argument that he’s mentally ill. Obama’s been the subject of a constant barrage of the vilest slander possible, and it’s just delusional to think he could possibly give a moment’s thought to what Donald Trump, a person he’s gone out of his way to mock and disparage multiple times in the past, might say about him. At this point Trump seems to engage in magical thinking about the power of his insults and has zero real-world understanding of what actually happened during the primaries. He thinks he talked his enemies into the cornfield with superhero mind power somehow. “I talked about them, and they went down,” he’s put it in nearly exactly those terms. Amazing.
He actually said this:
He’s got the cognitive abilities of a not-very-precocious 10-year old.
I’m pretty foggy on child development but I believe there’ve been models that say until a certain age—4 or 5, say—a child doesn’t really understand there’s a real world out there that follows its own rules. If you put something in a box, the child believes it’s disappeared, and so forth. He’s got that infantile sociopathic thing going on—he really can’t grasp that there’s a world outside the me-centered Trumpian universe, that there are other people in it with their own identity, thoughts, and feelings, that there’s a universe independent of him and indifferent to him. I doubt he ever will.