Last week, at a White House press conference, a reporter asked, President Obama, “Some of your critics have pointed to the incredibly polarized political climate under your administration as contributing to the rise of someone as provocative as Donald Trump. Do you feel responsibility for that?” He didn’t seem surprised by the line of inquiry.

But Obama isn’t just deflecting responsibility for Trump’s rise in GOP politics, he’s also directing blame where he believes it belongs. The Washington Post published a partial transcript of the president’s remarks on Friday at an Austin fundraiser, in which Obama made a compelling case that the 2016 frontrunner is simply capitalizing on the conditions Republican officials themselves created.

“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!’