President Obama said Monday that the call from “Never Trumpers” to vote against Donald Trump but vote for GOP lawmakers as a check against a Hillary Clinton presidency is a call for obstruction.
“Let me just translate that for you,” Obama said during a fundraiser in San Diego for Clinton’s election effort. “It is really important that we push back and defeat this argument, that somehow, the duly elected president of the United States should simply be blocked from doing anything by the opposition party.”
The president told the crowd of 350 donors that GOP lawmakers are basing their re-election prospects voters thinking that gridlock “is the best we can do” because it plays into Republicans’ philosophy in limited government.
“They’re okay with gridlock, but you know what? We can do much better than that,” he said.
While he noted that polls show Clinton with a sizable lead, he urged Democrats not to take it for granted because the “volatile” nature of the race mans “we can’t take anything for granted.”
In states like Ohio and Florida, the race is still too close to call, he said.
“This is one of these moments when we can’t afford to sit back and just assume that everything is going to work itself out,” he said.
Trump, he said, is more than dangerous, he is one of the only candidates, Democratic or Republican, in modern history who could do lasting damage to the U.S. political system.
While he called Clinton the most qualified person to ever seek the presidency, he denounced Trump as unfit, without naming him.
“Then there’s the other guy… I’m not going to belabor why this other guy is not qualified to hold this office, because ever time he talks you get more proof,” Obama said.
“America’s great, America can survive anything, but what America cannot have for any prolonged period of time is to have the person who is the only elected official elected by all the people of the United States and who speaks on behalf of this nation in world affairs as a fundamentally unserious person, and somebody whose standards of ethics and tolerance in how they treat other people is corrosive,” he said. “We can’t have that.”
