Obama Hits the Campaign Trail

The Highlights

• “He hasn’t shown any interest in doing the work or helping anybody but himself and his friends or treating the presidency like a reality show that he can use to get attention. And by the way even then his TV ratings are down… But the thing is, this is not a reality show, this is reality. And the rest of us have had to live with the consequences of him proving incapable of taking the job seriously. At least 220,000 Americans have died. More that 100,000 small businesses have closed. Millions of jobs are gone. Our proud reputation around the world is in tatters.”
• “We know that he continues to do business with China because he’s got a secret Chinese bank account… A secret Chinese band account. Listen, can you imagine, if I had had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for reelection. You think Fox News might have been a little concerned about that? They would’ve called me Beijing Berry. It is nota great idea to have a president who owes a bunch of money to people overseas… I mean of the taxes Donald Trump pays, he may be sending more to foreigh governments than he pays in the United States. His first year in the White House he only paid $750 in federal income tax. Listen, my first job was at a Baskin Robbins when I was 15 years old. I think I might have paid more taxes that year working at dispensing ice cream”
• “And I can tell you the presidency doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.”
• “I get that this president wants full credit for the economy he inherited and zero blame for the pandemic that he ignored.”
• “Tweeting at the television doesn’t fix things. Making stuff up doesn’t make people’s lives better. You’ve got to have a plan.”
• “Eight months into this pandemic, cases are rising again across the country. Donald Trump isn’t suddenly going to protect all of us. He can’t even take the basic steps to protect himself. Just last night, he complained that the pandemic made him go back to work. I’m quoting him. He was upset that the pandemic’s made him go back to work. If he’d actually been working the whole time, it never would’ve gotten this bad.”
• “And just yesterday, when asked if he’d do anything differently, Trump said, ‘Not much.’ Really? Not Much? Nothing you can think of that could have helped some people keep their loved ones alive?”
• “Donald Trump likes to claim he built this economy but America created 1.5 million more jobs in the last three years of the Obama-Biden administration than in the first three years of the Trump-Pence administration. How you figure that? And that was before he could blame the pandemic.”
• The economic damage he inflicted by botching the pandemic response means he will be the first president since Herbert Hooover to actually lose jobs.”
• “When the daily intelligence briefings flash warning signs about a virus, a president can’t ignore them. He can’t be AWOL. Just like when Russia puts boutnies on the heads of our soldiers in Afghanistan, the commander-in-chief can’t be missing in action. I can tell you this. Joe Biden would never call the men and women of our military suckers or losers.”
• We’re not going to have a president that goes out of his way to insult anybody who doesn’t support him or threaten them with jail. That’s not normal presidential behavoir… We wouldn’t tolerate it from a high school principal. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a co-worker. We wouldn’t tolerate it in our family, except for maybe crazy uncle somewhere. I mean, why would we expect and accept this from the President of the United States? And why are folks making excuses for that? ‘Oh, well, that’s just him.’ No. There are consequences to these actions. THey embolden other people to be cruel and divisive and racist, and it frays the fabric of our society, and it affect how our children see things. And it affect the ways that our families get along. It affect how the world looks at America… Character matters.”
• “Our democracy is not going to work if the people who are supposed to be our leaders lie every day and just make things up.”