President Obama’s brutal assessment of the rise of Donald Trump
“How can you be shocked?” he asked to laughter from the crowd, according to a transcript. “This is the guy, remember, who was sure that I was born in Kenya — who just wouldn’t let it go. And all this same Republican establishment, they weren’t saying nothing. As long as it was directed at me, they were fine with it. They thought it was a hoot, wanted to get his endorsement. And then now, suddenly, we’re shocked that there’s gambling going on in this establishment,” he said in an apparent reference to a famous line from the movie classic “Casablanca.”
.. What is happening in this primary is just a distillation of what’s been happening inside their party for more than a decade. I mean, the reason that many of their voters are responding is because this is what’s been fed through the messages they’ve been sending for a long time — that you just make flat assertions that don’t comport with the facts. That you just deny the evidence of science. That compromise is a betrayal. That the other side isn’t simply wrong, or we just disagree, we want to take a different approach, but the other side is destroying the country, or treasonous. I mean, that’s — look it up. That’s what they’ve been saying.
So they can’t be surprised when somebody suddenly looks and says, you know what, I can do that even better. I can make stuff up better than that. I can be more outrageous than that. I can insult people even better than that. I can be even more uncivil. I mean, conservative outlets have been feeding their base constantly the notion that everything is a disaster, that everybody else is to blame, that Obamacare is destroying the country. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. It’s not, we disagree with this program, we think we can do it better — it’s, oh, this is a crisis!
.. But they’ve got to acknowledge why this happened — because some of them have been writing that, “Well, the reason our party is going crazy is because of Obama.” Which is a pretty novel idea. The notion is Obama drove us crazy.
.. I didn’t cause the reaction. The reaction is something that they have to take responsibility for and then figure out how do we make an adjustment.
.. “Paul Ryan denounces Trump but not the Tea Party rhetoric that propelled his own political ascent,” he writes. “John McCain holds Trump in contempt, but selected as his running mate Sarah Palin, the Know-Nothing of Wasilla, one of Trump’s most vivid forerunners and supporters. Mitt Romney last week righteously slammed Trump as a ‘phony’ and a misogynist, and yet in 2012 he embraced Trump’s endorsement and praised his ‘extraordinary’ understanding of economics.”