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.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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."
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
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.
-
Grok in the crosshairs as EU launches deepfake porn probeIN THE SPOTLIGHT The European Union has officially begun investigating Elon Musk’s proprietary AI, as regulators zero in on Grok’s porn problem and its impact continent-wide
-
‘But being a “hot” country does not make you a good country’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Why have homicide rates reportedly plummeted in the last year?Today’s Big Question There could be more to the story than politics
-
Israel retrieves final hostage’s body from GazaSpeed Read The 24-year-old police officer was killed during the initial Hamas attack
-
China’s Xi targets top general in growing purgeSpeed Read Zhang Youxia is being investigated over ‘grave violations’ of the law
-
Panama and Canada are negotiating over a crucial copper mineIn the Spotlight Panama is set to make a final decision on the mine this summer
-
Why Greenland’s natural resources are nearly impossible to mineThe Explainer The country’s natural landscape makes the task extremely difficult
-
Iran cuts internet as protests escalateSpeed Reada Government buildings across the country have been set on fire
-
US nabs ‘shadow’ tanker claimed by RussiaSpeed Read The ship was one of two vessels seized by the US military
-
Maduro pleads not guilty in first US court hearingSpeed Read Deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores pleaded not guilty to cocaine trafficking and narco-terrorism conspiracy
-
Iran’s government rocked by protestsSpeed Read The death toll from protests sparked by the collapse of Iran’s currency has reached at least 19
