President Barack Obama is again complaining about conservative media, accusing it of creating candidate Donald Trump.
“Trump didn’t come out of nowhere now,” Obama said during a campaign speech in Miami. “For years, Republican politicians and far-right media outlets had just been pumping out all kinds of toxic, crazy stuff.”
Obama employed a straw man attack against conservative media, accusing them of starting “the whole birther thing” and calling climate change a “Chinese hoax.”
“According to them, I’m powerful enough to cause these hurricanes, and I’m about to steal everybody’s guns in the middle of the night and declare martial law, but somehow I still need a teleprompter to finish a sentence,” he said incredulously.
Obama argued that Republicans knew better than to allow such theories to continue, but they were silent because it would help them stay in power.
“They just stood by and said nothing, even though they knew better, while their base actually started believing some of this stuff,” Obama said.
Trump, Obama suggested, only took advantage of the current political climate to win the Republican primary.
“Donald Trump didn’t start all this. Like he usually does, he just slapped his name on it, took credit for it, and promoted the heck out of it,” Obama said.
The president has spent a great deal of his time in office complaining about conservative media, particularly Fox News and talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh.
Earlier this month, Obama floated the idea for “truthiness tests” for media outlets on the internet.
“There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world,” he said.