On Tuesday, Mr. Obama used the annual “Friends of Ireland” luncheon with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to launch his latest attack on Mr. Trump, although this time not by name. “We have heard vulgar and divisive rhetoric aimed at women and minorities — at Americans who don’t look like ‘us,’ or pray like ‘us,’ or vote like we do,” Mr. Obama said. A few days earlier at a fund-raiser in Austin, Tex., Mr. Obama was even more pointed. “We’ve got a debate inside the other party that is fantasy and schoolyard taunts and selling stuff like it’s the Home Shopping Network,” he said. He then went after Republican leaders like Mitt Romney who have in recent weeks expressed shock and outrage at Mr. Trump’s language.
“How can you be shocked?” Mr. Obama asked of Mr. Romney, the former presidential candidate who accepted Mr. Trump’s endorsement in 2012. “This is the guy, remember, who was sure that I was born in Kenya. Who just wouldn’t let it go.”
Aides recall the obviously false “birther” allegations stirred by Mr. Trump as an almost out-of-body experience. “Standing at the podium in the briefing room with the White House counsel to release the president’s birth certificate was probably the most surreal moment I had in the White House,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama, wrote in an email.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member