At long, long last, President Barack Obama has finally let Donald Trump, a desiccated, hollowed-out pumpkin stuffed with wasps, really have it after the presumptive GOP blatantly linked POTUS to the mass shooting in Orlando earlier this week.
On Monday morning during an interview with Fox News, the magnate and half-fermented bezoar called for Obama’s resignation over Sunday’s massacre at a gay club in Orlando which took the lives of 50 patrons and has been declared the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.
“Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” said Trump “And the something else in mind—you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”
POTUS addressed Trump’s comments the next day after addressing the U.S.’s fight against ISIL. In their reportage, CNN described the unique precedent POTUS set during his on-air speech:
The commander in chief’s fury, which seethed out of him in a stunning soliloquy on live television, amounted to a moment of historic significance: a president castigating one of the two people who could succeed him as beyond the constitutional and political norms of the nation itself.
As CNN also cited the innate irony of Trump’s claims, noting that “Trump’s response to the worst terror attack since 9/11" were logically flawed “given that Trump has hounded him for years with insinuations that he’s not a real American.”
The climactic moment during the president’s statement occurred with a condemnation directed towards “friends on the other side of the aisle,” whom he charged with making “the fight against ISIL is to criticize the administration and me for not using the phrase ‘radical Islam.’”
What exactly would using this label would accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to try to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this?
The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.
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They know full well who the enemy is. So do the intelligence and law enforcement officers who spend countless hours disrupting plots and protecting all Americans — including politicians who tweet and appears on cable news shows.
They know who the nature of the enemy is. So, there is no magic to the phrase “radical Islam.” It is a political talking point. It is not a strategy.
And the reason I am careful about how I describe this threat has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with actually defeating extremism.
While Obama did not refer to Trump by name, he did call out “proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States to bar all Muslims from immigrating into America”—ones that would suggest “entire religious communities are complacent in violence.”
As he continued:
Where does this stop? The Orlando killer, one of the San Bernardino killers, the Fort Hood killer — they were all U.S. citizens. Are we going to start treating all Muslim-Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminate them, because of their faith?
We heard these suggestions during the course of this campaign. Do Republican officials actually agree with this?
Because that’s not the America we want. It does not reflect our Democratic ideals. It won’t make us more safe, it will make us less safe, fueling ISIL’s notion that the West hates Muslims, making Muslims in this country and around the world feel like, no matter what they do, they’re going to be under suspicion and under attack.
It makes Muslim-Americans feel like their government is betraying them. It betrays the very values America stands for.
We have gone through moments in our history before when we acted out of fear, and we came to regret it. We have seen our government mistreat our fellow citizens, and it has been a shameful part of our history.
POTUS ended his speech with “praise for the spirit we [as Americans] see in Orlando.”
“That’s what will preserve our values and our ideals that define us as Americans,” he concluded. “That’s how we are going to defend this nation and that’s how we are going to defend our way of life.”
Guess that’s our president’s birthday gift to you, Trump.
Contact the author at jamie.reich@jezebel.com.
Image via Getty.