Obama says if a Democrat behaved like Trump, 'I couldn't support him'


Former President Barack Obama told a crowd in Miami on Monday that he puts country over party, and if there was a Democrat behaving "the way our current president does, I couldn't support him."
Obama has spent the last several days on the campaign trail for the Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, visiting battleground states like Florida and Georgia. In Miami, Obama railed against President Trump, and said that if he "saw a Democrat who was lying every single day — the fact checkers can't keep up, it's like, just over and over again — I would say that's not the example I want, I don't trust that person to manage the country's affairs because it's violating the values that we try to live by. And those are values we try to teach our kids."
Since Trump entered office, The Washington Post has been tracking how many false and misleading claims he has made, and in July, he hit 20,000.
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Obama also brought up the GOP talking point that Biden is a socialist in disguise, an accusation that is being pushed hard in Florida, which has a high Cuban American population. "Here in south Florida you see these ads, 'Joe palling with Communists, palling with socialists,'" Obama said. "You'd think he was having coffee with Castro every morning. Don't fall for that. Joe Biden served as a senator from Delaware, he was my vice president. I think we'd all know if he was a secret socialist by now."
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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