Think Donald Trump is a strong conservative alternative to President Obama? You might want to think again! Pat and Stu juxtaposed some of his recent, aggressive comments with ones he made not that long ago. He criticized Bush, praised Obama, and more!
What were some of the things he was saying just two years ago?
Trump right after 2008 election: “Bush has been so bad, maybe the worst president in the history of this country.” “So incompetent, so bad, so evil.”
For comparison, Trump now says: “ [Obama]'s been a horrible president. I always said the worst president was Jimmy Carter.”
Trump in 2008: “You can be enemies with people, whether it's Iran or Iraq or any other place, have dialogue. [Bush people] won't even talk to him. It's terrible.”
Stu pointed out that Trump is essentially making a policy statement here. “Bush sucks because he won't talk to President Ahmadinejad. That was his point there: We should be meeting with these people; we can have a dialogue.”
Trump in 2008 on Obama: “I think he has a chance to go down as a great president. Now, if he's not a great president, this country's in trouble. I think he's going to lead through consensus. It's not going to be a bull run like Bush did, he just did whatever the hell he wanted, go into a country, attack Iraq which had nothing to do with the World Trade Center, just do it because he wanted to do it.”
“Now, this reminds me of why I thought Donald Trump was a liberal Democrat in the first place. And I was blown away when he announced he was a Republican and he was maybe going to run for the Republican nomination,” Pat said.
“I mean, we were talking all the redistribution of wealth, we were talking about all the socialist policies, we were talking about how this guy wanted to completely reshape American foreign policy and has, by the way. We were talking about a guy who didn't really take Islamic extremism seriously; he didn't really believe that you couldn't negotiate with Ahmadinejad. All of those things. And Trump was okay with it all,” Pat added
President Obama was more than eager to talk about The Donald's remarks in a recent interview because it makes conservatives look ridiculous.
“All of us have been struck by Donald rising to the top of the Republican field by feeding fantasies about your background. What do you make of that?” The President was asked.
“I think that over the past two and a half years there's been an effort to go at me in a way that is politically expedient in the short term for Republicans but creates I think a problem for them when they want to actually run in a general election when most people feel pretty confident the president was born where he says he was, in Hawaii,” Obama responded.
Stu said, “It draws attention away from him raising taxes, from him trying to soak the rich, from him doing things that seem completely suicidal to our economy. Instead he could just be, he can just say, oh, well, that's people, they don't even think I was born here.”
“The fact that someone's even talking about the Birther thing at this point, the guy's been president for two years. I mean, I don't know, I don't know at this point why it would even possibly be valid,” Stu concluded.