In President Obama’s pentagon pre-vacation briefing, when it came time to talk about Trump and his latest statements on the election being rigged, Obama called Trump a ridiculous crybaby.
In sum: Trump is a ridiculous sore loser conspiracy theorist who needs to be publicly reminded not to leak the classified intelligence briefings he’s about to start getting as a major party nominee.
But the president didn’t stop there. After spending his introductory statement pointedly pronouncing the names of the ISIL strongholds American-backed operations have taken, and the prominent ISIL leaders his administration has killed—“none of ISIL’s leaders are safe, and we are going to keep going after them,” he said, for effect — Obama skewered the Republican nominee.
“I would ask all of you to just make your own judgment,” Obama said, turning to one of the early, prominent examples of Trump displaying his ignorance about world affairs. “Just listen to what Mr. Trump has to say and make your own judgment with respect to how confident you feel about his ability to manage things like our nuclear triad.”
Talk about fighting words. The problem right now is that Trump is getting access to high level security briefings, and because Trump has a propensity for leaking and never keeping his mouth shut at critical times, the worry those in government have is that he will start leaking all of those classified intelligence briefings to the public.
“I thought I made myself pretty clear,” Obama said, batting down the third question out of the first four that he got about Trump. “I obviously have a very strong opinion about the two candidates who are running. One is very positive. And one is not so much.”
Or you could have just watched him trying to hold himself back for long enough for a reporter to finish asking a question about Trump’s claim that the election will be rigged to start mocking him.
He couldn’t hold it for long. He was laughing as he called Trump “ridiculous.”
“I don’t even really know where to start on answering this question,” he said. “Of course the elections will not be rigged. What does that mean?”
Obama sketched out what a nationwide conspiracy would have to look like, the number of people involved, the silence and complicity even in Republican strongholds like Texas.
“That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t think anybody would take that seriously,” he said.
Just to be clear what the difference is between Trump’s and the serious president Obama is eager to remind people he is, he took this as an opportunity to launch into actual voting problems that his administration has been concerned about and remains concerned about, particularly around potential civil rights violations at the polls that he said his Department of Justice is on the lookout for.
As for Trump’s assertion that the election is rigged against him, Obama was very clear on that point.
“I think all of us at some points in our lives have played sports or maybe just played in a schoolyard or sandbox, and sometimes folks if they lose, they complain they got cheated,” Obama said. “But I’ve never heard of somebody complaining about being cheated before the game was over. Or before the score is even tallied.”
As for the classified briefings Obama clarified what he thought Trump would do with them.
Then he dared Trump, the man who’s said, albeit not recently, that once he’s elected, “I’m going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored.”
“What I will say is that they have been told these are classified briefings and if they want to be president, they have to start acting like a president and that means being able to receive these briefings and not spread them around,” Obama said.
Pressed again on whether he thought Trump could be trusted, Obama seemed satisfied with himself.
“I think I’ve said enough about that,” he said.
Sounds like Trump is boxed in. Now we get to see what Trump will do.