President Barack Obama answers questions at the White House in Washington, D.C. on May 6. | Getty Obama previews his Trump attack plan The president lays out his case against the Republican presumptive nominee. And enjoys it.

Get serious, President Barack Obama said Friday—and that goes for Donald Trump and all the Republicans who say they believe in their principles, but also Congress, voters, reporters and Bernie Sanders.

Obama didn’t say anything shocking in his impromptu press conference on Friday, pinned to the back of a statement urging people to see the wider picture of economic progress despite a light jobs report that doubled as an attack on congressional inaction for not doing more to help.


But if you’re looking for a playbook of the pointed swipes he’s going to spend the next six months taking on Hillary Clinton’s behalf—yes, her behalf, because though Obama said he thinks the primary process should play out and that Bernie Sanders has been good at raising issues, there’s delegate math, and "I think everybody knows what that math is”—it was all there in his 25 minutes in the White House briefing room.

It boils down to this: Trump, in Obama’s mind, is a buffoon-charlatan hybrid who’s only gotten as far as he has because the Republican Party’s a mess and reporters have fallen for the act. The president’s going to keep pointing out that being president isn’t a joke, all while he keeps laughing at Trump and chastising reporters for not asking enough follow-up questions (though of course, Obama took only four questions himself, and no follow-ups as he made this point).

The question that brought Obama the most visible amusement was one about House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) distancing himself from his own party’s nominee.

"I think you have to ask Speaker Ryan what the implications of his comments are," Obama said, his face breaking out in a smirk born of seven years of being told his problems with the Republican Party stem from what he’s done wrong, and the last six months watching the evidence mount in increasingly fireball-in-the-Metro type ways that there’s something wrong with the Republican Party.

The question he tried to dismiss, but couldn’t help reveling in: what about that Trump taco bowl tweet?

"I have no thoughts on Mr. Trump's tweets. As a general rule, I don't pay attention to Mr. Trump's tweets," Obama said, then piling on for the sake of mocking the political press corps that Trump once again played like Les Paul on a guitar — “that will be the same for the next six months, so you can just file that.”

He started chuckling, ducking past the other part of the question that was about how Democrats who still have primaries to vote in should feel about the ongoing investigations about Clinton’s email server—which afterward press secretary Josh Earnest said he wouldn’t be commenting on, or discussing regarding whether any White House officials have been interviewed by the FBI to date.

The answer that he had fully prepared, though, was his reaction to Trump locking up the Republican nomination.

“There’s going to be plenty of time to talk about his positions on various issues. He has a long record that needs to be examined and I think it’s important for us to take seriously the statements he’s made in the past,” Obama said. “I just want to emphasize the degree to which we are in serious times and this is a serious job. This is not entertainment. This is not a reality show.”

Candidates who say they’ve got answers to problems have to be pressed on whether that answer is “actually plausible,” Obama said. “If it’s completely implausible and would not work, that needs to be reported on, the American people need to know that.”

What joy and excitement there is these days among Democrats in Washington. For years, most of them haven’t liked Obama much, and Obama’s made clear he really hasn’t liked most of them much either.

But as Trump’s turned the Republican Party into more of a Republican rave on bad acid, he’s achieved something that Democrats are supposed to be incapable of: unity, from top to bottom. Sanders and Clinton have been hugging Obama tight and squeezing for months, and House and Senate candidates all around the country are doing the same.

A month before the 2014 midterms defined by his own party’s candidates speeding away from him, Obama famously caused a collective screaming vomit from Democrats when he said his policies were on the ballot.

Friday, he ticked through all his policies, and how the Democrats running agree with him on all of them—health care, raising the minimum wage, investing in infrastructure, immigration reform, prudent use of military force, taking care of veterans.

“As far as Democrats, I think we run on what we’re for, not just what we’re against,” Obama said. “I want Democrats to feel confident about the policy prescriptions we’re putting forward, and the contrast I think will be pretty clear. I’ll leave it up to Republicans to figure out how they square their circle.”

Meanwhile, planning remained theoretically underway for the Trump-Ryan summit to be convened by Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus next week, which would, in order to meet the conditions both the speaker and candidate have put forward, require one of them to turn around on a lot of the things he’s said or believes.

“Paul Ryan said that I inherited something very special, the Republican Party,” Trump tweeted Friday morning. “Wrong, I didn't inherit it, I won it with millions of voters!”

