Obama to GOP: You built Trump

COLUMBUS, Ohio — President Barack Obama on Thursday night tore into Republican leaders for “riding this tiger” of what he repeatedly called “crazy” hoaxes and conspiracies that created the conditions for Donald Trump to become their presidential nominee—and blasted anyone now trying to distance themselves out of what he derided as political expediency.

No one who stands by Trump this year, Obama said, can claim to be serious about family values or foreign policy. And nobody can claim higher ground than Trump if they spent the last eight years pursuing an agenda he said was pure opposition, embracing a right-wing media that regularly trafficked in conspiracy theories and accepting personal attacks on him from their base.


“They stood by while this happened, and Donald Trump as he’s prone to do, he didn’t build the building himself — he just slapped his name on it and took credit for it,” Obama said.

Obama’s move mirrors the strategy that’s started bubbling up from Hillary Clinton’s campaign as she attempts to finish off a trailing Trump by re-connecting him to the Republicans she spent most of the campaign saying he wasn’t part of. Republicans are in a box, is the argument: any who supported Trump, or at least didn’t actively denounce him, deserves to go down with him.

“They don’t get credit,” Obama said, mocking the people who’ve insisted that their reaction to the 2005 “Access Hollywood” hot mic tape is the reason they have a problem with the Republican nominee.

Standing here in Columbus at the Ohio Democratic Party dinner, Obama singled out Sen. Rob Portman, who’s leading his opponent, former Gov. Ted Strickland, by double digits, and just in the last week said he’d be writing in Trump running mate Mike Pence instead of voting for the nominee himself. But Obama said the same applied to anyone who’d made a similar calculation, only in the aftermath of the tape and “learning about the polling.”

“You can’t wait until that finally happens and then say that’s too much and think that somehow you are showing any kind of leadership and deserve to be elected to the United States Senate,” Obama said. “You don’t get points for that.”

In part, the president seemed determined to provide the follow-up punch to first lady Michelle Obama, who Thursday morning in New Hampshire delivered one of the most searing Democratic speeches of the campaign so far, calling Trump’s campaign “not normal,” “disgraceful” and “intolerable,” and calling on women to have a moral obligation to reject him in light of the reports of alleged sexual assault. The president was on Air Force One flying to Pittsburgh while she was speaking, but watched her speech in his car shortly after and urged the crowd in Columbus to pull it up themselves.

Clearly veering off-script, Obama turned to the example of proud Obama antagonist Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whom he didn’t name, but noted had ordered the state National Guard to observe the 2015 Operation Jade Helm military exercises after right-wing media exploded with conspiracy theories about how it was actually secret prep for an Obama led junta. Abbott, Obama said, had said he didn’t know if the talk was true.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? What does that mean?” Obama said, leaning on the podium, his voice rising in anger. “They took it seriously. This is in the swamp of crazy that has been fed over and over and over and over again.”

Obama said he’s more forgiving of those who actually believed all the terrible things said about him and the government, but political punishment needs to come to “the people who knew better and didn’t say anything.”

The stakes are enormously high for down-ballot Democrats, who are hoping that what appears to be a late Trump collapse will do for them what they haven’t been able to do themselves in a year of attempting to get ahead in races by crafting Republican House and Senate candidates as mini-Trumps, despite what’s ranged from lack of interest to active resistance from Brooklyn.

Of all the Democratic Senate candidates running in competitive races, Strickland seems the least likely to win — but there are several, from Nevada to Florida to Missouri to North Carolina and even Arizona, that could potentially be pulled over the finish line by a combination of Trump tanking and turnout depressed by Republican voters dispirited by what their candidates are doing. There are dozens of House races, state legislative races and potentially a governor’s race or two where the link to Trump could make a difference, and 26 days out, Obama repeatedly made that case.

“If your only agenda is negative — negative’s a euphemism — crazy — based on lies, based on hoaxes,” Obama said, “this is the nominee you get. You made it possible.”

And if Republicans insist that their problem with Trump is just his bragging about sexual assault or the women who’ve now accused him of assaulting them, Obama said, they have to answer for why they didn’t speak up when he proposed the Muslim ban or any number of other policies the president called offensive and destructive.

“I guess that didn’t quite tip that over the edge. Why was that OK?” Obama said.

For all of his energetic attacks, though, Obama acknowledged that this has been “a deeply dispiriting election year.”

He reflected on his own successes over eight years, why none of that has broken through to so many people.

“Sometimes you wonder how did we get to the point where we have such rancor?” Obama said, chalking some of the reaction up to people who are still struggling economically, that change is happening quickly, that there is so much information out in the world that it’s hard to know sometimes what to believe and what not to believe.

But this election, Obama said, really is the most important one of his lifetime. “It’s really true,” he insisted, given the choice.

“It’s also about affirming this democracy and affirming the basic idea that people who love their country can change it,” Obama said. “The journey’s not done yet. I’m still fired up.”

He knows how much of drumming up the enthusiasm for Clinton even now, though, remains on him.

Earlier in the day in Pittsburgh, he tried out a new simulator to practice docking at the International Space Station.

“I don’t want to crash,” he told the reporters watching him. “I’m trying to make sure that I don’t crash.”

After he finished successfully, he turned back to the reporters with a big smile. "Your ride is here, baby," he said.

