President Barack Obama criticized presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump without mentioning his name during a
commencement address at Rutgers University.
Focusing on several themes that tried to draw a sharp divide between his worldview and that of Trump, the president made several barely veiled references to the real estate mogul.
"Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science: These are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy ... But if you are listening to today's political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from. So … let me be as clear as I can be... in politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue."
Obama also appeared to take issue with several specific topics that have been central to the Trump campaign, such as building a wall on the Mexican border to keep out immigrants and temporarily barring Muslims from entering the United States.
"Suggesting that we can build an endless wall along our borders and blame our challenges on immigrants, that doesn't just run counter to our history as the world's melting pot, it contradicts the evidence that our growth and our innovation and our dynamism has always been spurred by our ability to attract strivers from every corner of the globe...that's how we became America, why would we want to stop it now?" Obama said.
The president also appeared to mock Trump's Make America Great Again campaign slogan, telling the audience "it's part of human nature … to want to look backward and long for some imaginary past when everything worked, and the economy hummed and all politicians were wise and every child was well-mannered and America pretty much did whatever it wanted around the world.. Guess what? It ain't so. The good old days weren't all that good."
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