During an appearance this week on Jimmy Kimmel Live to promote his new memoir A Promised Land, former President Barack Obama joked that Navy SEALs could help escort Donald Trump out of the White House if he refused to leave. So far, Trump has shown no indication of any willingness to conclusively accept the results of the recent presidential election, which he lost conclusively and decisively to President-elect Joe Biden. Trump has claimed that he won the election — but that’s just not at all true.
Obama’s joke about sending Navy SEALs after Trump came after Kimmel jokingly asked about potential hiding places in the White House. After the host asked whether someone could hide out in some corner of the premises if they’d been slated for removal, Obama replied, “Well, I think we can always send the Navy SEALs in there to dig ‘em out.” Recently, the Biden campaign itself took a similar approach to the situation — in a statement issued shortly after Election Day, the campaign poignantly noted that “the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”
What would the next step in Trump’s progression of nonsense even be? Has the United States had any other modern president who was this desperately disconnected from basic reality, as if they led a cult? The disconnection from reality of the president’s conspiracy theories feels difficult to overstate — he has claimed, for instance, that so-called vote “dumps” from the aftermath of Election Day automatically warrant suspicion because of their timing and Democratic slant, but these post-election changes to vote tallies emerged because… authorities and election workers were counting ballots. In Democratic-leaning areas, and when handling mail-in ballots — which Democrats have disproportionately preferred, a pro-Biden slant is obviously going to emerge!
Obama has spoken out more directly about Trump’s dangerously unhinged behavior. During a recent 60 Minutes interview, the former president said as follows:
‘We have gone through a presidency that disregarded a whole host of basic institutional norms — expectations we had for a president that had been observed by Republicans and Democrats previously. And maybe most importantly, and most disconcertingly, what we’ve seen is what some people call ‘truth decay,’ something that’s been accelerated by outgoing President Trump, the sense that not only do we not have to tell the truth, but the truth doesn’t even matter.’
Watch those comments below:
“What we've seen is what some people call truth decay. Something that's been accelerated by outgoing President Trump, the sense that not only do we not have to tell the truth, but the truth doesn't even matter,” says former President Obama. https://t.co/SemqJzMGMD pic.twitter.com/oaV7vGG3K2
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 16, 2020
