Obama on Trump: This is not a reality show

President Barack Obama pauses while speaking in the briefing room of the White House in Washington, Friday, May 6, 2016

WASHINGTON (AP) — In his first remarks about Donald Trump’s status as the GOP’s presumptive nominee, President Barack Obama on Friday urged the media to undertake tougher scrutiny of presidential candidates.

“We are in serious times and this is a really serious job,” Obama said at the White House. “This is not entertainment; this is not a reality show.”

Obama suggested that Trump’s rise was enabled by a press that focuses on the frivolous.

“What I’m concerned about is the degree to which reporting and information starts emphasizing the spectacle and the circus,” Obama said, simultaneously acknowledging the GOP nominee is a spectacle and placing partial blame on the media for creating him.

“That’s not something we can afford. And the American people, they’ve got good judgment; they’ve got good instincts, as long as they get good information.”

With his brief comments, tagged on the end of remarks about the economy, Obama inched closer to engagement in a race he has tried to keep at a safe distance. The president tipped his hand at his likely line of attack on the likely GOP nominee, a former reality TV star, and he delicately weighed in on a prolonged contest in his own party.

The White House has said Obama will be a regular presence on the campaign trail for the Democratic nominee once his party coalesces around a single candidate. Asked about the Democratic fight, Obama wasn’t ready to directly urge Sen. Bernie Sanders to get out of the race, but he suggested the writing was on the wall.

“Let’s let the process play itself out,” Obama said, when asked whether it was time for Sanders to call it quits. Then he added: “I think everybody knows what that math is.”

Sanders’ rival, Hillary Clinton, has a lead of more than 300 pledged delegates and has received about 3 million more votes than Sanders during the primaries. Including superdelegates, Clinton is more than 90 percent of the way to clinching the nomination.

Still, the White House has been loath to appear to be meddling in the race, wary that it could anger Sanders’ devoted followers and undermine Obama’s ability to act as a uniting force.

In an interview with Pittsburgh TV station KDKA on Friday, Vice President Joe Biden warned that it would be a mistake not to take Trump seriously, pointing to the possibility that Trump could start to make himself seem more presidential.

Biden said Trump might manage “to bring significant people around him on domestic and foreign policy and to do the policy pieces where people think that this guy could actually be president.”

Obama said it will be up to Republican voters — specifically Republican female voters — to decide “is that the guy I feel comfortable with in representing me and what I care about?”

Asked whether he had a reaction to Trump’s recent outreach to Hispanics — a tweet that included a photo of the candidate eating a taco bowl — Obama dismissed the question.

“I have no thoughts on Mr. Trump’s tweets. As a general rule, I don’t pay attention to Mr. Trump’s tweets,” he said. “And I think that will be true for, I think, for the next six months. So, if you could just file that one.”

3 Comments

1. Dave Francis

   May 7, 2016 at 12:52 PM

   Presumptive nominee Trump championed on his campaign around building a wall between Mexico and the US and having Mexico pay for it. He has gained express amusement, derided, criticized, and even threatened for this stance. However, this issue caught the imagination on the voters of America who as taxpayers are sick of paying for the illegal alien invaders and the drugs that are killing our children.

   Some of the most effective security walls right now are in Israel. The better-known one is the barrier around the West Bank. Its morality and legality are hotly debated, but its construction has coincided with a steep drop in terror attacks in Israel.

   In comparison, the U.S. border with Mexico is roughly 2,000 miles long. How effective are the fences along it? It depends on your standard. The construction of some 640 miles of fencing there since 2006 has cost billions of dollars, and in areas where it’s very high, it seems to stop crossings the tens of billions spent on security—building fences, adding more Border Patrol agents. but it certainly would preserve human life and end the incessant supply of drugs, not to forget the criminal aliens that moved into the “Sanctuary Cities” and more so National Security?
   The Corruption Chronicles blog at http;//www.judicialwatch.org is a place to go to see the truth about the existential national security threat from our nation’s largely unprotected and thoroughly compromised southern border. The report we put this week will have you wondering if anyone here in DC – Republican or Democrat – is thinking about our nation’s safety: The ONLY politician willing to face the reality is Donald Trump, when others seen to care more for their own Status Quo and not for the American people?

   Its been reported that Mexican drug traffickers are helping Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the United States to explore targets for future attacks, according to information forwarded to Judicial Watch by a high-ranking Homeland Security official in a border state. Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso, Texas. Khabir trained hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen and has lived in Mexico for more than a year, according to information provided by JW’s government resource.

   Now Khabir trains thousands of men—mostly Syrians and Yemenis—to fight in an ISIS base situated in the Mexico-U.S. border region near Ciudad Juárez, the intelligence gathered by JW’s source reveals. Staking out U.S. targets is not difficult and Khabir actually brags in an Italian newspaper article published last week that the border region is so open that he “could get in with a handful of men, and kill thousands of people in Texas or in Arizona in the space of a few hours.” Foreign Affairs Secretary Claudia Ruiz, Mexico’s top diplomat, says in the article that she doesn’t understand why the Obama administration and the U.S. media are “culpably neglecting this phenomenon,” adding that “this new wave of fundamentalism could have nasty surprises in store for the United States.”

   “On September 13, 2006, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) introduced the Secure Fence Act into the U.S. House of Representatives. The next day, the House passed the bill by a voted of 283-138. Two weeks later, the measure passed in the Senate by a vote of 80-19. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2006. “While the Secure Fence Act was supposed to see to it that 700 miles of double-layered, barbed wire fence was built along the U.S./Mexican border, along with more vehicle barriers and manned checkpoints, only about 30 miles of the double-layered, 14-foot high fencing has in fact been built.

   Evidently the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton have disparaged and scoffed at the idea of building a wall. The wall critics have morally stated, “That’s not who we are” or “We build bridges not walls”. So explain this height of hypocrisy. We are funding and building a massive wall and equipping it with high-tech electronic surveillance equipment to run the entire length of the Tunisia/Libya border and our tax dollars even assisted in building the wall in Israel?

   Reply
2. Dave Francis

   May 7, 2016 at 12:53 PM

   President Obamas in a speech called Donald Trumps wall on our Southern border with Mexico and for Mexico to pay for it–’Wacky & Ridiculous”. Meanwhile Tunisia is building its own barrier and guess what–Obama and YOU the taxpayers are paying for it.

   OF COURSE TRUMPS WALL WILL WORK, WITH THE ALL SEEING EYE OF UNMANNED DRONES AND NEW STATE OF THE ART SENSORS, CAMERAS AT INTERVALS AND PERHAPS WATCH TOWERS. MY YOUNG RELATIVE DIED FROM AN OVERDOSE OF DRUGS, WHICH HAS MADE ME A SERIOUS ADVOCATE FOR THE TRUMP WALL? AT ONE TIME JUST CALIFORNIA, ARIZONA, NEW MEXICO, AND TEXAS HAD THE WORRY OF THE INTERDICTION OF THE SURGE IN ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION–BUT EVERY STATE TODAY HAS BECOME A BORDER STATE AND SUFFERING FROM THE ILLEGAL ALIEN INVASION?

   At one time citizens in other states had no real worry, but illegal aliens are spreading out thanks to President Obama’s overriding the US Congress, and don’t seem to care about the millions of American workers, as the infestation gets ever worse? Then we have House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senator Cruz and Hillary Clinton approving of even more foreign workers imported into the country legally by increasing visa applications. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton told Silicon Valley executives in 2007 that she supported raising the H-1B cap.

   That same year, as a U.S. senator from New York, Clinton helped Tata Consulting, an Indian outsourcing firm that is one of the top users of the visa, open an office in Buffalo. Today, Clinton does not mention the H-1B visa on her presidential website. Companies that have in-sourced cheaper foreign professional labor have angered American society, because it steals jobs from the US labor market? The disgraceful part of the issue, present American workers, must train these people before they are let go–or lose their bonuses.

   It’s hypocritical, that Congress in 2006 said after former Bush signed into law ‘The Secure Fence Act’ after less than 32 miles, they said they couldn’t complete the Double Layer fencing as they had run out of funds. Yet Obama in office is ABLE to fund the Tunisian wall. In a statement, the diplomatic mission said that the US was disbursing the first installment of the $24.9 million project to strengthen security along their frontier. According to the embassy, the project involves the installation of an integrated surveillance system using sensors and regular security equipment.

   Tunisia has built a 200-kilometer (125-mile) barrier that stretches about half the length of its border with Libya in an attempt to prevent militants from infiltrating. A series of deadly attacks by IS on foreign holidaymakers last year, which have dealt a devastating blow to the country’s tourism industry, are believed to have been planned from Libya.

   Tunisian officials have told reporters that Islamist terrorists are being trained in Libya and then coming to Tunisia to conduct attacks, so Tunisia’s prime minister has announced the construction of a 100-mile-long wall along the country’s eastern border.

   Reply
3. names of white

   May 7, 2016 at 4:47 PM

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   Reply