Mississipi Sen. Roger Wicker thinks President Obama’s decision to criticize Donald Trump at the G7 summit last week demonstrates he is “tone deaf” when it comes to knowing when to be political.
“It concerns me that the president would take a political message to an overseas forum like that,” Wicker told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. “I can just imagine how Ronald Reagan or even Bill Clinton would have answered that question as president of the United States.”
“I think they would have said, ‘Look, I’m over here representing the American people. I’m over here trying to engage in diplomacy,'” he said. “There’s a time for political speeches, but a press conference in a foreign country is not the time.”
At the end of the first day of the G7 summit in Japan last Thursday, Obama told reporters that foreign leaders are “rattled by Trump” and unsure “how seriously to take some of his pronouncements.”
“A lot of the proposals that he’s made display either ignorance of world affairs or a cavalier attitude or an interest in getting tweets and headlines instead of actually thinking through what is required to keep America safe and secure and prosperous,” he said.
Wicker, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee and is supporting Trump as the GOP nominee, described Obama’s comments in Japan and during a recent commencement address as “inappropriate.”
“It’s totally inappropriate for President Obama to be saying that sort of speech. Just like the other day, he was at a graduation ceremony and there were bound to be independents, Republicans, Democrats in the crowd, and he starts making jokes about a potential nominee for president,” he told Bartiromo.
“I think his timing and his sense of when to be political is tone deaf,” the Mississippi senator said.
