Donald Trump "is unfit to be President" according to President Obama who challenged congressional Republicans who have criticized their presidential nominee to disavow his candidacy.
"The question I think they have to ask themselves is, if you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?" Obama said Tuesday at a news conference at the White House following a meeting with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
"What does this say about your party that this is your standard bearer? This isn’t a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. This is daily. Weekly."
"There has to come a point at which you say someone who makes those kinds of statements doesn’t have the judgment, the temperament, the understanding to occupy the most powerful position in the world," Obama said.
Never the shrinking violet, Donald Trump lashed out at Obama's "failed leadership"...
"Obama-Clinton have single-handedly destabilized the Middle East, handed Iraq, Libya and Syria to ISIS, and allowed our personnel to be slaughtered at Benghazi. Then they put Iran on the path to nuclear weapons. Then they allowed dozens of veterans to die waiting for medical care that never came.
Hillary Clinton put the whole country at risk with her illegal email server, deleted evidence of her crime, and lied repeatedly about her conduct which endangered us all. They released criminal aliens into our country who killed one innocent American after another -- like Sarah Root and Kate Steinle -- and have repeatedly admitted migrants later implicated in terrorism. They have produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression. They have shipped millions of our best jobs overseas to appease their global special interests. They have betrayed our security and our workers, and Hillary Clinton has proven herself unfit to serve in any government office.
She is reckless with her emails, reckless with regime change, and reckless with American lives. Our nation has been humiliated abroad and compromised by radical Islam brought onto our shores. We need change now."
But the list of establishment Republicans that say they are voting for Hillary Clinton is staggering... (as The End of The American Dream blog's Michael Snyder details)...
Who would have ever believed that so many big names in the Republican Party would publicly pledge to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election? All throughout the primaries and the caucuses, the Republican establishment expressed tremendous disdain for Donald Trump, but they were unable to derail his march to the nomination. Now that we have reached the general election, some of the biggest names in the GOP are actually taking the unprecedented step of crossing over to the other side and are publicly announcing their support for Hillary Clinton. This shows that many of these individuals were only “Republicans in name only” to begin with, and it also demonstrates the lengths that the elite are willing to go to in order to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.
One of the latest big Republican names to publicly support Hillary Clinton is Sally Bradshaw. CNN is describing her as “Jeb Bush’s top adviser”, and she has gone so far as to completely remove herself from the Republican Party because of Donald Trump…
Jeb Bush’s top adviser, Sally Bradshaw, has left the Republican Party to become an independent, and says if the presidential race in Florida is close, she’ll vote for Hillary Clinton.
Bradshaw, who’s been close to the former Florida governor for decades and was senior adviser to his 2016 campaign, officially switched her registration to unaffiliated. She told CNN’s Jamie Gangel in an email interview that the GOP is “at a crossroads and have nominated a total narcissist — a misogynist — a bigot.”
“This is a time when country has to take priority over political parties. Donald Trump cannot be elected president,” Bradshaw said.
Bradshaw has been working for the Bushes ever since the 1988 presidential campaign, and she never would have made such a bold move without the approval of the Bushes.
Needless to say, the Bushes absolutely hate Trump, and they have a vested interest in seeing him lose the election. There are some that believe that Jeb Bush is already lining up for another run in 2020, and Donald Trump has to lose in order for that to be possible.
In addition to Sally Bradshaw, another prominent friend of the Bush family has also recently announced that he is going to be voting for Hillary Clinton. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was at the center of the storm during the financial crisis of 2008, and not too long ago he announced his intentions in the Washington Post…
“When it comes to the presidency, I will not vote for Donald Trump,” Paulson wrote in The Washington Post last week. “I will not cast a write-in vote. I’ll be voting for Hillary Clinton, with the hope that she can bring Americans together to do the things necessary to strengthen our economy, our environment and our place in the world. To my Republican friends: I know I’m not alone.”
Does Henry Paulson actually believe that Hillary Clinton can “bring Americans together to do the things necessary to strengthen our economy, our environment and our place in the world”?
I find that difficult to believe.
But apparently he intends to try to persuade as many of his fellow Republicans as possible to vote for Hillary Clinton, and a whole bunch of other establishment Republicans have already lined up behind her.
These are just some of the big Republican names that the Washington Post says have already committed to voting for Hillary Clinton…
Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state and adviser to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush
Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and adviser to three previous GOP presidents
Alan Steinberg, regional EPA administrator
Kori Schake, National Security Council and State Department aide
Doug Elmets, former Reagan spokesman
Jim Cicconi, former Reagan and George H.W. Bush aide
Charles Fried, former U.S. solicitor general under Reagan
Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, former Reagan State Department aide and adviser to the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney
Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and adviser to GOP presidential candidates
Peter Mansoor, retired Army colonel and former aide to David Petraeus
Larry Pressler, former three-term Republican senator from South Dakota
Arne Carlson, a former two-term Republican governor of Minnesota
Robert Smith, former judge on New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals
Mark Salter, former top adviser to John McCain
Mike Treiser, former Mitt Romney aide
Ben Howe, editor at RedState.com
As I have said all along, the establishment will do whatever it has to do to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.
If that means voting for Hillary Clinton and encouraging others to do the same, that is precisely what they are going to do.
And if more insidious means are necessary, the establishment definitely has plenty of tricks up their sleeves. Politics in America is a very, very dirty game, and if you have ever been deep inside a national campaign you know exactly what I am talking about.
At this point, even Donald Trump is raising concerns about the integrity of the upcoming election. On Monday, he told a rally in Ohio that he is “afraid the election is going to be rigged”…
Donald Trump said he’s afraid the general election in November will be rigged, but didn’t elaborate on the comment at a rally in Ohio Monday afternoon.
“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” the Republican nominee for president said, in remarks that did not mention the controversy generated by his comments about the parents of a slain U.S. soldier.
In my opinion, Donald Trump has legitimate reasons to be concerned. We have already seen the elite spend millions upon millions of dollars to try to defeat him, and virtually all of the big money on Wall Street is lining up behind his opponent. Many patriotic, conservative and faith-oriented Americans are really hoping that Trump can win and move this nation in a positive direction, but the truth is that he is facing overwhelming odds.
Ultimately, it is probably not going to matter too much who wins this election, because America is on the verge of a time of chaos unlike anything we have ever seen before. No matter who the next president is, we are going to see civil unrest, rising crime, political scandals, governmental shaking, major economic and financial problems, and geopolitical events will continue to spiral out of control.
And the establishment is going to do everything it possibly can to make sure that the next president is not Donald Trump. If you go to just about any major news website on the Internet these days, there will be a negative story about Donald Trump featured very prominently, and it is usually accompanied by some sort of positive story about Hillary Clinton.
In the end, one of the biggest stories that will come out of the 2016 election will be the fact that the American people got to see how far the elite are willing to go to keep someone that is not “in the club” from becoming president.
The establishment absolutely loathes Trump, and they are willing to move heaven and earth to try to stop him.
Hold on tight, because the next three months are going to be very, very interesting.
* * *
And now, as Reuters reports, a Republican lawmaker in Congress became the first to break with the party and support Democrat Hillary Clinton for the White House on Tuesday amid signs of growing Republican unease with volatile presidential nominee Donald Trump.
The break by Representative Richard Hanna of New York followed days of uproar over Trump's criticism of the parents of a Muslim U.S. Army officer killed in the Iraq war, which has fueled a fresh round of Republican rebukes of the New York businessman.
Several congressional Republicans have said they will not support Trump in the Nov. 8 election against Clinton, but Hanna was the first to take the extra step of endorsing the Democrat.
Citing Trump's attacks on the Khans, Hanna called him "deeply flawed in endless ways," "unrepentant" and "self-involved."
"For me, it is not enough to simply denounce his comments: He is unfit to serve our party and cannot lead this country," Hanna wrote in a letter posted on syracuse.com, the website of the Post-Standard newspaper in New York.
* * *
Don't forget BlackLiesMatter...
