President Obama, speaking at a fundraiser in Austin, Texas, directs the blame for Trumpism right where it belongs:
"How can you be shocked? This is the guy, remember, who was sure that I was born in Kenya. Who just wouldn’t let it go. And all this same Republican establishment, they weren’t saying nothing. As long as it was directed at me, they were fine with it. They thought it was a hoot. Wanted to get his endorsement. And then now, suddenly, we’re shocked that there’s gambling going on in this establishment....What is happening in this primary is just a distillation of what’s been happening inside their party for more than a decade." (emphasis added)Actually, quite a bit more than a decade, going back before Nixon's white supremacist "Southern strategy," to the politics of Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Joseph McCarthy and the dangerously loopy assortment of right- wing fringe groups that thought that a Commie plot was behind everything from fluoridation of water to Dwight Eisenhower's administration. Make them own it.
