Obama says he has faith that Americans will be ‘sensible’ and won’t elect Trump
RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. — President Barack Obama issued his strongest warning yet Tuesday about the Republican candidates running for president in the current election with a two-word message about why voters should choose solemnly: nuclear codes.
Bluntly questioning f ront- r unner Donald Trump’s temperament, Obama said, “Whoever is standing where I’m standing right now has the nuclear codes with them, and can order 21-year-olds into a firefight.”
A restive electorate ultimately will decline to elect Trump, he predicted.
“The American people are pretty sensible,” Obama said. “And I think they’ll make a sensible choice in the end.”
Word to the runners
Although he referred specifically to Trump, Obama also took care to warn about all of the GOP candidates.
“Not a single one of them” are talking about some of the world’s biggest problems, he complained.
The words represented Obama’s most energetic criticism of the Republicans running to replace him. For months, he has mostly kept a studied distance from the fray and resisted invitations to engage in political analysis.
But GOP candidates are promising to dismantle Obama’s entire legacy if they win the Oval Office, and polls show Trump dramatically in the lead in South Carolina going into the state’s Saturday primary. Such numbers are infusing his campaign with more momentum on the heels of his decisive win in New Hampshire last week.
Asked about the president’s comments at a South Carolina forum, Trump responded with relative restraint, saying only that Obama had done a “lousy job as president” and that he would have defeated him in 2012 had he run.
“For him to say that is actually a great compliment,” Trump argued of Obama’s criticism.
As he launches his agenda for his final year in office, aides say, Obama has been increasingly concerned about protecting his legacy, including his health care reform and immigration policy as well as his attempts to orient U.S. foreign policy away from war and toward diplomacy.
His comments Tuesday also reflected the view of someone who’s long been critical of the hyperactive political environment — he at one point admonished not only politicians engaging in theater but reporters who cover the campaign as “entertainment” as well — and whose own outlook has also been tempered by the responsibilities of the office for seven years himself.
After two days of meetings with 10 Southeast Asian leaders here at the presidential getaway estate of Sunnylands, Obama said he is also worried about what the campaign speeches and interviews are doing to American relations abroad.
‘A serious job’
Foreign observers are troubled by some of the rhetoric, he said.
In the past, Obama has singled out in particular Trump’s pledge to ban Muslims from entering the country and deporting anyone not living in the country legally.
In a conversation with reporters at the close of the Sunnylands summit, Obama said Trump isn’t the only one he’s worried about.
“This is not just Mr. Trump,” Obama said. “There’s not a single candidate in the Republican primary that thinks we should do anything about climate change. … The rest of the world looks at that and says, ‘ How can that be?’ ”
Voters are venting, he said, but that ultimately “reality has a way of intruding.”
“I have a lot of faith in the American people. And I think they recognize that being president is a serious job,” he said. “It’s not hosting a talk show, or a reality show. It’s not promotion. It’s not marketing. It’s hard. And a lot of people count on us getting it right.”