President Obama on Tuesday argued that Donald Trump shouldn’t have his finger on the nuclear button because he doesn’t have the “preparation, the temperament or the core values” to be president.
Obama phoned in to Ryan Seacrest’s radio show the morning after this first debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton to talk about the importance of voter registration. But he also readily offered his thoughts on the debate, according to a CNN report of the on-air discussion.
The president said he enjoyed watching “what was a pretty vigorous debate about where we need to take our country.”
He took specific issue with Trump’s remarks on the spread of nuclear weapons and climate change.
“I get worried when I hear somebody like Donald Trump start saying, ‘Well, I don’t necessarily know whether Japan or Korea should be protected by us — maybe they should get their own nuclear weapons,'” Obama told Seacrest, noting that he’s especially concerned with what impact a Trump presidency would have on his daughters’ generation.
“That shows somebody who doesn’t pay attention to these issues, and you don’t necessarily want close to the nuclear button,” he said.
On climate change, he repeated Clinton’s reference to Trump’s tweet arguing that climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese.
“When you hear somebody like Trump say he thinks this is a plot by the Chinese, that this a fraud and a hoax, when 99 percent of scientists are saying you’ve got to do something about it, that worries me,” Obama said.
