Barack Obama may be charismatic but he has also earned a reputation as a measured, even cautious politician who chooses his words carefully. Yet when he launched into an attack on Donald Trump’s latest ramp-up of his Islamophobic plans, there was clear anger in his voice.
Though he did not mention the presumptive Republican candidate by name, Obama criticized Trump’s latest plan to extend his anti-Muslim US entry ban to any citizen from any country that has had an incident of anti-US terrorism. It was not the American way, said the president.
Obama has also shared the widely held belief that Trump had sought through social media to take political advantage of the Orlando massacres. Instead of focusing on the insanity of mass gun ownership in the US, Trump focused on the fact that the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen had said that he was acting in the name of Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) which had later laid obscene claim to the slaughter.
Yet it seems for Donald Trump that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
He revels in his phony reputation for telling it like it is. He has made the smashing of every tenet of accepted political wisdom his dazzling stock-in-trade. The more that he can insult and denigrate, the happier his supporters seem to be. Yet could it be that the bombastic billionaire has finally gone too far?
Trump has condemned Obama for refusing to use the term “radical Islam” in his condemnation of the Orlando massacre. But he has then gone on to accuse Obama of being unpatriotic, which he has followed up with the demand that the president resign.
The idea that any president in the months before his second and final term of office ends should even consider resignation is laughable. But there is a part of the Trump campaign’s anti-Obama rhetoric that is no laughing matter at all. When Obama won the presidency in 2008, there were hardcore conservatives who could not bring themselves to accept that their country now had a black man as president. Moreover, Obama’s father had been a Muslim. Immense sums were paid to investigate the new president’s past and, it strongly appears, to try and doctor the record to prove that Obama was not born in the United States. Had that been the case, he would not have been entitled to run as president.
The mudslinging did not work and not only because it had no substance. For all their political polarization, Americans do tend to rally around the office of the Presidency. Thus when George W Bush scraped home, thanks only to some dubious Florida electronic voting machines, it was generally recognized that the office was more important than the man and voters quit their complaints. In the world’s most litigious nation, this was some development. Now that Trump is breaking the rules and showing disrespect, if not indeed contempt, for the president and the presidency, he may encounter his first serious pushback.
Obama may have proven to be a weak, indecisive and deeply disappointing American leader, but he has demonstrated, like the equally weak and unsuccessful Jimmy Carter before him, that he is a basically decent man overwhelmed and flummoxed by the political challenges he had to face. Demonstrating scathing disrespect for this man may not be one of Trump’s better moves.
