'Dude, You Were President': Obama Flings Trump's Line Of Attack Right Back At Him
www.huffpost.com
Barack Obama accused his successor of giving one answer for every issue: "blame the immigrants."

Former President Barack Obama deconstructed some of Donald Trump’s playbook attacks while campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris in Nevada on Saturday.

Speaking at a rally in Las Vegas, Obama accused the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), of leaning on scaremongering about immigration as an answer to any issue.

“If you challenge them, they’ll fall back on one answer. It does not matter what it is — housing, health care, education, paying for the bills — one answer: blame the immigrants,” he said.

“He wants you to believe that if you elect him, he will just round up whoever he wants and ship them out and all your problems will be solved,” he added.

He acknowledged that there’s a “real issue” at the border and elements of the system are “broken,” but criticized Trump’s approach.

“When I hear Donald Trump talk … he’s very quick to say to Kamala, ‘Well, you were vice president for four years,’” he added. “Dude, you were president for four years!”

  • SleepyPie@lemmy.world
    71·
    17 days ago

    “He couldn’t solve the problem because deep state.”

    There is no zinger, no matter how truthful, that will penetrate the average republican voter’s weaponized schizophrenia.

  • MyOpinion@lemm.ee
    71·
    17 days ago

    A president that left countless people to die to a pandemic and recommended that they inject bleach. Trump is a monster.

  • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    17 days ago

    He acknowledged that there’s a “real issue” at the border and elements of the system are “broken,”

    If I say it, I get buried in down votes. Yes, we have a problem and it involves real people with real lives. Acting like the issue is 100% GOP bullshit isn’t helping to either fix the issue or help these people.

    For example, look at the downward trend for 2024. Well, that’s good news isn’t it? That’s 100,000 people the Border Patrol encountered trying to get in, in a single month. We have to talk about how we are to employ, feed and shelter that many people. And they are constantly flowing in.

    I have no idea how best to proceed, the logistics are boggling, but pretending nothing is happening is not a strategy.

    • MegaUltraChicken@lemmy.world
      80·
      17 days ago

      pretending nothing is happening is not a strategy

      No one is pretending that nothing is happening. The Democratic Party has proposed a variety of solutions and the GOP has blocked 100% of them. Everyone recognizes there’s a problem, but only one of the major parties is blocking progress on this specific issue.

      You’re getting down voted because you’re giving credence to the GOP argument that this is somehow due to lack of action by the current administration. There’s a problem with our immigration system AND the GOP is completely full of shit 100% of the time on immigration. Both are true.

      • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        17 days ago

        And the Democrats have zero plans as to how:

        we are to employ, feed and shelter that many people

        All I see from the left side of the aisle is more ways to prevent immigration. And once again, liberals have no clue that real lives are on the line and use this as a political football. Not nearly as bad as conservatives, but still, I’m not hearing how we deal with these folks once they’re here. All the Dems got is finer-honed blocking plans, nada about the humanitarian crisis.

        Notice how your comment says nothing about the real humans involved?

        • MegaUltraChicken@lemmy.world
          9·
          17 days ago

          Democrats have proposed a path to citizenship. They have proposed improving the process of immigrating to the United States by adding judges and streamlining the process. They support a strong social safety net. They support improving working conditions. All things that help with the root causes for a lot of the problems in our immigration system. And all of which have been shut down by the GOP.

          Hell, the only reason the Democrats are mainly talking about enforcement and not fixing the system in its entirety right now is because that’s literally the only thing the GOP would entertain when they negotiated the deal Trump tanked.

          I don’t think it’s fair to claim the Democrats are using the issue as a political football when they’re actually operating in good faith. We need to stop allowing Republicans to get elected and sabotage the process.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          7·
          17 days ago

          Trump’s plan for the real humans involved is to deport them all. Which would take so much time that it would involve concentration camps.

    • TunaCowboy@lemmy.world
      17·
      17 days ago

      I wonder how much the influx of immigrants has to do with the GOP falsely claiming ‘the border is wide open, they’re letting everyone in!’ on an international stage at every opportunity for the past two decades.

      • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        17 days ago

        I have no idea. I asked my Filipino wife how much American politics entered into her plans to come here. She told me that they’re really not aware of the political situation, don’t care, they just want to get here.

        I find that hard to believe, but there’s an anecdote, hell I know. We got a Honduran friend I’ll ask. Doesn’t speak a lick of English after 5-years stateside, but I’d be interested in what he can say. Cool note: That man walked for a month to get here. Probably getting away from homosexual persecution, whatever, he’s a brave man.

        • TunaCowboy@lemmy.world
          10·
          17 days ago

          I’m also interested in what your black friend and jewish coworker have to say, please let me know, thanks!

      • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        17 days ago

        Uh, you can’t see the issue with 100,000 lives pouring into a country in a single month? OK.

        I’m from Tulsa, OK originally. Not exactly a cow town. You could fill that city in 4-months with that many people, and Tulsa has been around since 1836, not even 200-years. Or, fill Chicago in a little over 2-years (whew, that’s some rough back-of-the-napkin math!)

        Think a moment on the housing, food, sewage, power, water, etc. to provide for that many lives. It’s staggering and we keep loading more and more and more. Our population has increased by 138 million since I was born. That’s a 60% increase. You cool with the environmental and carbon increases?

        But hey! Pretend it’s not a problem. These people earn slave wages, pay taxes, get zero benefits, sound good? Don’t hear libs complaining about any of that. Modern slavery by any other words.

        • Match!!@pawb.socialEnglish
          4·
          16 days ago

          you don’t care about a single one of those things you cite as problems. this is why your grandkids avoid you.

      • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
        4·
        17 days ago

        I mean, I can see it being a logistical problem for the areas directly on the border if people that come in stay there instead of spreading across the country to avoid overtaxing local resources, but on the whole, one would think lots of people coming in would be a good thing. Immigration is what is keeping the country slowly growing instead of being in population decline the way many other countries are these days, and in general, more people does translate to more economic and military power as long as you can maintain the same per-capita economic conditions once they arrive. If anything, we should be trying to attract immigrants in my view

        • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          17 days ago

          Yes! We need immigrants, but the logistical problems are a little more than you dumb down. See my comment here. We’re not slowly growing, we’re bulging at the seams. And I haven’t even touched on the environmental impacts of this population growth.

          It’s sticky as hell, and you seem to get that. Anyone with simple answers is just that, simple.

          • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
            4·
            17 days ago

            I mean, the thing with the environmental impacts of it is that these people already existed, so any increase in climate impact from them is driven not by actual population growth in a global sense, but in people here having a higher quality of life. We need to decouple that from carbon emissions of course, but in the meantime, I dont know that “Some people who were incredibly poor are now a bit less poor” is really the worst reason for an increase in climate impact. 100000 a month is a bit over million people a year, which sounds like a lot, but when the country has over 300 million people, that is in the ballpark of a third of a percent. That doesnt seem like very much to me. It seems silly to say the country is “bursting at the seams” or “we’re full” as I sometimes hear people say in the same vein- when we have a lower average population density than the world as a whole. Countries like India and China manage well over 4 times that in a similar amount of space, and if we want to stay globally relevant in the long run in a world where there are countries with over a billion people that are rapidly developing economically, it seems to me that we would benefit from roughly similar numbers. If we can achieve this by allowing the impoverished from elsewhere to come, add the better aspects of their culture to ours like migrant groups have done before, and improve their quality of life while doing so (granted, actually treating immigrants to the standards we treat eachother is something we need to work on), that strikes me as win-win. Yes, population growth poses a strain on things like housing and public services, but we do have enough raw land, and the infrastructure is something that we can build, indeed, building it is itself something that can drive economic growth and job creation.

    • RattlerSix@lemmy.world
      9·
      17 days ago

      That 100,000 number is the number of border encounters, which counts people caught crossing illegally and people trying legally but being denied entry. While we don’t have any way of knowing for sure, the apprehension rate was estimated at 78% in 2017-2020 and has quite possibly gone up a little since then. The 78% of people caught crossing is 100,000, the number of people actually crossing successfully is a lot lower.

      • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
        5·
        17 days ago

        And that’s the number of crossing encounters; likely the same people attempted to cross many times, and 78% of the time they were caught.

        Oftentimes, people aren’t crossing the border to find a new life in the US; they’re crossing to visit friends, do some shopping/smuggling, or find some itinerant work, after which they cross the other direction.

  • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    16 days ago

    If Trump had his wits about him and he definitely does not, his retort would be to lie about the things that he did manage to do. He would just claim that immigration was the best it had ever been and he took care of it while he was in office and it’s just slinked back since.

    It’s a fantastic dig from Obama unfortunately it’s only going to be received well by Trump’s opponents. His base is already under the impression that he did a good job.