President Obama scorches Republicans over years of "toxic" politics

President Obama is relishing his role as campaigner-in-chief, and at a Hillary Clinton rally in Miami on Thursday, he showed why he is so good at it. Many people have spent the last year trying to make the point that Donald Trump is the distillation of, not a departure from, Republican politics. But no one has come close to making the point so well:

And here’s the thing: Trump didn’t come out of nowhere, now. For years, Republican politicians and far-right media outlets have just been pumping out all kinds of toxic, crazy stuff. I mean, first of all, there was the whole “birther” thing. Then they start saying climate change is a Chinese hoax. And according to them, I’m power enough to cause these hurricanes and I’m about to steal everybody’s guns in the middle of the night and declare martial law, but somehow I need a teleprompter to finish a sentence.

They’ve been saying crazy stuff, and there are a lot of politicians like Marco Rubio who know better, but they just look the other way. Because they figure, you know what, if they really — if we can just stir folks up and think that Barack or Hillary or others are doing all these terrible things we’re saying they’re doing, that’s going to help us get votes. We’ll just oppose anything they’re trying to do, and maybe we’ll end up having more power in Washington.

And so they just stood by and said nothing, even though they knew better. While their base actually started believing some of this stuff. I say all this because Donald Trump didn’t start all this. Like he usually does, he just slapped his name on it, took credit for it, and then promoted the heck out of it.

Indeed.