Obama has a message for Republicans abandoning Trump

Says they should be held accountable for consequences

President Barack Obama on Sunday savaged Representative Joe Heck for failing to reject Donald Trump earlier in the presidential race, seeking to tarnish Heck and other Republican candidates across the country by association with a standard-bearer he called indecent and unfit for the presidency.

Speaking at a high school here as he began a three-day campaigning and fundraising trip, Obama portrayed Heck, who is in a competitive Senate race that could determine control of that chamber, as having helped enable Trump’s rise by endorsing his breed of divisive politics. Only now, with Trump’s campaign foundering, is Heck willing to abandon him, the president said.

“I understand Joe Heck now wishes he never said those things about Donald Trump,” Obama told several thousand people, noting that Heck had said he had “high hopes” that Trump would become president and thought he was fit to have control over the nuclear codes. “But they’re on tape, they’re on the record, and now that Trump’s poll numbers are cratering, he said, ‘I’m not supporting him’? Too late! You don’t get credit for that.”

In wading so aggressively into the Nevada race, in which Heck is vying against Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democratic former state attorney-general, to succeed Harry Reid, the retiring Senate Democratic leader, Obama was working to broaden his argument against Trump into one that can sully a large number of Republicans.

The president said they had flirted for years with a strain of bare-knuckled partisanship that appealed to people who sought to delegitimize him by falsely asserting that he was born outside the United States and was plotting to take Americans’ guns and impose martial law.

Now, he said, they should be held to account for the consequences.

“They just stood by and said nothing, and their base actually began to believe this crazy stuff,” Obama said.