WASHINGTON _ President Barack Obama called on Republican leaders Tuesday to back off their support for Donald Trump's candidacy, saying that their public denunciations of his increasingly erratic behavior were no longer sufficient to distance themselves from a nominee Obama declared unfit to be commander in chief.
One week after Obama delivered a stinging rebuke of Trump at the Democratic convention, casting the GOP nominee as a "homegrown demagogue" unworthy of the nation's trust, the president stood in the East Room of the White House alongside a visiting head of government and declared Trump was "woefully" unprepared to succeed him.
But instead of casting Trump's views as distinct from Republican and conservative philosophies, as Obama did last week, he said Tuesday that the party leaders risked blurring that distinction by continuing to stand by him.
Obama laid out his case for Republicans: Trump's foreign policy statements are at odds with longstanding and bipartisan U.S. doctrine, and his more recent sparring with the family of an Army captain killed in Iraq go beyond an "episodic gaffe" typical of modern campaigns. Republican leaders, Obama said, need to say, "Enough."
"The alternative is that the entire party, the Republican Party, effectively endorses and validates the positions that are being articulated by Mr. Trump," Obama said.
Trump responded by blasting both Obama and opponent Hillary Clinton, the president's former secretary of State, for policy missteps at home and abroad.
"Hillary Clinton has proven herself unfit to serve in any government office," he said. "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."
Some Republicans have become increasingly vocal in their reactions to Trump. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who still faces a Republican primary for re-election this month, issued a lengthy statement Monday saying Trump's remarks about Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of an Army captain who was killed in the Iraq war and who appeared at the Democratic National Convention, "do not represent the views of our Republican Party, its officers, or candidates." Though he said he still supported Trump, he said the fact that he was the nominee was "not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us."
Retiring Rep. Richard Hanna of New York went further Tuesday. He wrote in the Syracuse Post-Standard that he would vote for Clinton, calling Trump "deeply flawed in endless ways."
"I do not expect perfection, but I do require more than the embodiment of at least a short list of the seven deadly sins," he said.
In statements this weekend, both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., expressed support for the Khans' sacrifice but did not mention Trump by name. On Tuesday, spokespeople for each declined to comment on the president's comments. Zack Roday, a spokesman for Ryan's re-election campaign, also declined to respond to Trump's expression of support for another Republican challenging Ryan in a primary in his Wisconsin district.
"Rather than engage in a back-and-forth, the speaker is going to remain focused entirely on ensuring we deliver strong Republican majorities this fall," Roday said.
A senior Republican aide, granted anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on political matters publicly, brushed off Obama's comments.
"The Democratic president who has endorsed the Democratic nominee for president today complained about the Republican nominee for president," he said. "That's what a sitting president does."
Obama has long maintained Democrats would hold the White House after his term, and ultimately offered a full-throated endorsement of Clinton to be his successor. As the primaries began early this year and Trump's popular support manifested into votes, the president expressed confidence that Americans would reject Trump, recognizing they would not entrust the nuclear codes to someone better known for a reality television show.
But with Trump now formally the GOP's nominee and polls showing a tight general election contest, Obama has become more blunt. Last week he conceded a Trump victory could happen, encouraging fellow Democrats to be "running scared."
"I've seen all kinds of crazy stuff happen," he told NBC News.
On Tuesday, Obama diagnosed Trump's liabilities coolly and with lawyerlike precision. Among them: that he "doesn't appear to have basic knowledge around critical issues in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia."
Obama noted that he had serious policy differences with the two Republicans he defeated to win and hold the office, McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
"But I never thought that they couldn't do the job," he said.
"Had they won, I would have been disappointed, but I would have said to all Americans, 'This is our president, and I know they're going to abide by certain norms and rules and common sense, will observe basic decency,' " he said.
Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, saw Obama making both a political argument but also one on principle.
"A major party either collapsing or experiencing crisis is not good for the other party," he said. "When you are the president, particularly a president nearing the end of your term, his interest is not political. What he wants is for the United States to be secure, and for his legacy to be secure. And handing the country over to an unstable sociopath would endanger both things substantially."
Third Way and the Truman National Security Project have been advising Democrats on what they call an "Admit He's Unfit" campaign to pressure Republicans to acknowledge what they see as Trump's liabilities. Trump's posture toward Ryan in particular speaks to the necessity of doing so, Bennett said.
"He is not going to change. There will not be a pivot," he said. "Trump is telling the world as loudly and as clearly as he can that this is me. So if you think this behavior will stop with the campaign ... you are crazy."
