On an 11th-hour swing to stump for Hillary Clinton, President Obama told voters in Ann Arbor, Mich., today that Donald Trump doesn’t know “working people except for the folks who clean up in his hotels and the folks who mow the fairway on his golf course.”
The University of Michigan event was Obama’s first stop of the day, followed by stops at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and on Independence Mall in Philadelphia tonight, joined by Clinton and first lady Michelle Obama.
The university said there were more than 9,000 people in the stadium when Chelsea Clinton introduced the president.
Obama quipped that “over the weekend, [Trump’s] campaign took away his Twitter account. Now, if your closest advisers don’t trust you to tweet then how can we trust him with the nuclear codes?”
Reminding the audience about the auto bailout, Obama stressed that “when I came into office, the industry was flat on its back.”
“And we made some tough decisions to bring workers, management, everybody together in order to revitalize the industry. Just last summer, Donald Trump said ‘you could have let it go bankrupt, frankly,'” he said. “…Had the Big Three gone bankrupt, or two of the three gone bankrupt, that could have cost a million jobs across this country. That could have killed Michigan’s economy. But Donald Trump didn’t stop there. He actually suggested shipping Michigan’s auto jobs to states that don’t have unions so they can pay their workers less.”
“I think we’ve earned some credibility here,” the president said of his two terms in office. “So when I tell you that Donald Trump is not the guy who’s going to look out for you, you need to listen. Don’t be bamboozled. Don’t fall for the okie-doke. In his 70 years on Earth, The Donald has never shown any regard for working folks.”
Obama said one’s character “only gets magnified” once in the Oval Office, “like an EKG for your character.”
“If you denigrate minorities before you take office, then you’ll denigrate minorities after you take office. If you think of immigrants as criminals and rapists when you’re running for office, then that’s how you’re going to think once you’re in office. If you mock people with disabilities, or treat women as objects, calling them ‘pigs’ and ‘dogs,’ and rating them on a 1-to-10 scale instead of based on their character and intelligence, then that’s how you’re going to think when you’re in office,” Obama continued. “If you insult POWs and talk down to our troops, and say you know more than our generals do about fighting terrorism — even though you don’t know the difference between Shia and Sunni then that’s how you’re going to conduct yourself as a commander in chief.”
The president added that “it’s bad being arrogant when you know what you’re talking about, but it’s really bad being arrogant when you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“If you accept the support of Klan sympathizers, if they say they really like what you’re doing and you’re kind of slow to denounce or separate yourself from them, that’s what you’re going to do when you’re in office. If you disrespect the Constitution by threatening to shut down a free press when they write things you don’t like — or threaten to throw your opponent in jail while you’re in the middle of a presidential debate — or discriminate against people of different faiths, that’s what you will do when you’re in office, regardless of the oath to uphold the Constitution that you have to take in this office,” he said.
Trump has needled Obama for his campaign schedule, telling a crowd in Jacksonville, Fla., on Thursday that Obama’s “down here campaigning for Crooked Hillary — now, why isn’t he back in the office — sometimes referred to as the Oval Office — why isn’t he back in the white house bringing our jobs back and helping our veterans? Why? Why isn’t he back working?”
Today in Sarasota, Trump said, “You know where Obama is now? Not working on jobs, not working on Mosul, where they gave him four months advanced notice, our military.”
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