WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama today said that he would feel “deeply disturbed” if Donald Trump is sworn in as his successor and reiterated that the billionaire is not somebody who is fit to be president in any circumstances.
“He (Trump) is not somebody who’s fit to be president in any circumstances. I would feel deeply frustrated, not because anything he said about me, but because I would fear for the future of our country,” Obama told MSNBC.
“I say that mindful of the fact that there are disagreements between Republicans and Democrats, but I’ve said this in speeches before. When I ran against John McCain, I thought he had wrong ideas, and I believed I would be a better president,” he noted.
“But I didn’t think that if John McCain was president that basic standards of decency, basic constitutional norms would be out the window. When I ran against Mitt Romney, I disagreed with him on his economic policies, but he released his tax returns, I wasn’t worried about what kinds of business interests that he might have,” he added.
“When Donald Trump says that he is prepared to be president, and he will have his family run his businesses, not in a blind trust, when he’s got all kinds of business interests that nobody knows what’s what and where money is coming from and where it might be going, that is the kind of unprecedented attitude with respect to the highest office in the land that would make me concerned about the country as a whole,” Obama said.
Obama who is on a campaigning blitz in key battleground states said the good news is that the majority of the American people recognise that he’s not fit to be president.
“The challenge that we always have, is that who votes doesn’t always match up with the attitudes of the majority. If we had a system in which consistently the majority of the American people voted, not just during presidential years, but midterms, Congress would look very different and we’d have very different policies,” he said.
“In Hillary Clinton, the country has somebody who is an outstanding public servant, knows her stuff, is as experienced as anybody has ever been for this office,” he said.
“And you have another guy who is temperamentally unfit to be commander in chief, unqualified, doesn’t know anything or seem to be concerned about learning basic public policy, who has shown himself to be a bully and willing to discriminate against people, who are not like him, or somehow oppose him,” Obama alleged.
“When you have a choice that stark, the idea that you would sit on the sidelines is unacceptable,” he said. Observing that progress is never made overnight, Obama said the fact of the matter is that nobody is going to be able to deliver everything to everybody right away from this office, as powerful as it is.
PTI