Obama labels Trump’s tough talk ‘xenophobia, or worse’

President Obama challenged the contention Wednesday that Donald Trump is a populist and got an assist from Mexico’s president, who warned darkly that Hitler and Mussolini used rhetoric similar to Trump’s with tragic results.

In a screed that he himself described as a “rant,” the president said that a populist must fight for the working class and “ordinary people,” which he charged Trump has never done, and not simply criticize the downside of the global economy or denigrate immigrants.

“That’s not the measure of populism,” Obama said. “That’s nativism. Or xenophobia. Or worse.”

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Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is said to be putting together quite a cast of characters from the sports world to appear at next month’s national convention in Cleveland.

Former boxer Mike Tyson, former NFL coach Mike Ditka, former college basketball coach Bobby Knight and NASCAR chief Brian France have been tagged for some sort of role at the event, according to a report by Bloomberg Politics.

After that report was published Tuesday, folks apparently were giddy at the possibility of Tyson speaking in front of GOP delegates and a national television audience.

But Trump took to Twitter that night to say that won’t be the case.

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Donald Trump, who so far in the general election has spent nothing on television advertising in battleground states, received a boost from the National Rifle Assn. on Wednesday as the group announced an ad campaign assailing Hillary Clinton’s handling of the Benghazi attacks.

The 30-second spot, released by the NRA Political Victory Fund, is narrated by Mark Geist, a Trump supporter and former security contractor who fought in the assaults on U.S. diplomats and CIA contractors in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was among four Americans killed in the attacks.

“A lot of people say they’re not going to vote this November because their candidate didn’t win. Well, I know some people who won’t be voting this year either,” Geist, who penned a 2014 book critical of Clinton and the State Department’s response to the attack, says as he walks through a cemetery. “Hillary as president? No thanks. I served in Benghazi. My friends didn’t make it. They did their part. Do yours.”

The ad is the first from the NRA this election cycle and is set to air on cable television in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Support from the NRA arrives at a time when Trump is being trounced by Clinton on the airwaves in key states. A report from NBC News and SMG Delta released on Tuesday showed Clinton and her allies outspending Trump $26 million to zero.

But the substance of the attack on Clinton may have little traction.

A final report released by the House Benghazi committee on Tuesday showed no new evidence of wrongdoing by the former secretary of State. At its core, the report accuses the government of incompetence at various levels and misguided planning, even in the midst of the violence.

In response to the report, Clinton told reporters in Denver on Tuesday it’s “time to move on” from investigating the 2012 attack.

White nationalists whose rally over the weekend in Sacramento turned violent are planning to go to Cleveland during at the Republican National Convention to support Donald Trump’s backers, according to a report.

“We’re essentially just going to show up and make sure that the Donald Trump supporters are defended from the leftist thugs,” Traditionalist Worker Party spokesman Matt Parrott told McClatchy News.

A bloody brawl erupted over the weekend at the California Capitol as the white nationalist group and skinheads clashed with counter-protesters wielding signs reading “Nazi scum.”

Seven people were stabbed, nine were hospitalized and others injured, authorities said.

Parrott has blamed the anti-fascists for the riot, but told McClatchy he expected high security at Cleveland would prevent violence.

“You’re going to have a relatively civil event where you’re going to have the leftists protesting Trump and you’re going to have us arguing up against the leftists,” he told McClatchy. “And you’re going to have the police there ensuring that you’re going to have a first-world situation and not some sort of ‘Gangs of New York’ knife fight.”

The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

GOP convention officials said Wednesday that law enforcement officials knew of the group’s plans and were preparing for the convention.

Experts who monitor extremist groups called those involved in the Sacramento event part of a new era of white nationalism that merges older and new strains — a type of “intellectual racism” that has been common in such circles.

Donald Trump bolted into the Rust Belt on Tuesday to deliver his most full-throated attack on globalization to date, railing against trade pacts and threatening to impose tariffs against countries he said were exploiting open trade policies.

But Trump, who also backed Great Britain’s vote last week to withdraw from the European Union, acknowledged that he used to be among those “financial elites” who benefited from the system.

Indeed, just three years ago, Trump promoted a near-opposite view, using the global village-type of language he now deplores.

“We’ve all become aware of the fact that our cultures and economics are intertwined,” he wrote in a CNN column, published as part of the television network’s coverage of the gathering of world elites for the annual economic forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We will have to leave borders behind and go for global unity when it comes to financial stability.”

In the column, unearthed by Mother Jones, Trump seemed to acknowledge, and even celebrate, that “our economic health depended on dependence on each other to do the right thing” during the financial crisis.

“We are now closer to having an economic community in the best sense of the term — we work with each other for the benefit of all,” he continued.

Not quite the same as his recent assertion that Brits have declared their independence by voting to leave the European Union.

“The future of Europe, as well as the United States, depends on a cohesive global economy. All of us must work toward together toward that very significant common goal,” he wrote at the time.

Contrast that happy talk with his assessment Tuesday of the global economy.

“This wave of globalization has wiped out our middle class.... The people who rigged the system for their benefit will do anything — and say anything — to keep things exactly as they are.”

As he put it himself: “I hate to say it, but I used to be one of them.”

The first Obama-Clinton rally, scheduled for June 15, was postponed after the Orlando nightclub massacre.

Last-minute fundraising appeals often come with a message of alarming hyperbole.

But Donald Trump’s effort to boost his money haul by a June 30 quarterly-report deadline has sent his overtures into classic Trump-style bravado.

“Breaking: Hillary to be Indicted in November,” blared one subject line.

“Media won’t show you this - “ offered another.

And then simply: “We’re going to win.”

Trump’s campaign started the month with just $1.3 million cash on hand, a severe deficit to Hillary Clinton’s $42.5 million.

It’s not just the Trump tone of the campaign missives, but the frequency of the email pleas this week has been notable for a candidate who has boasted of his self-funded campaign.

Several emails to donors have already arrived, with a half-dozen landing in supporters’ in-boxes Wednesday morning alone.

It looks like it’s going to be a steady barrage until month’s end.

The Clinton campaign and a super PAC backing her will unleash $13 million in television advertising next week in an effort to deal a blow to Donald Trump while he is absent from the airwaves.

Most of the ads will air in Florida and Ohio, two battleground states in the election. Clinton’s campaign will spend about $7.5 million, and the super PAC Priorities USA about $5.5 million, according to analysts at CMAG/Kantar Media.

Trump’s campaign still hasn’t begun airing television ads, and Clinton’s team is to influence voters, particularly in crucial swing states, before he does.

Trump has been slow to raise funds for his general election run. At the end of May, Trump’s campaign held about $1.2 million cash on hand compared with Clinton’s $42 million, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump issued starkly contrasting responses to the attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport on Tuesday that killed at least 41 people.

“It reminds us that the United States cannot retreat,” Clinton said in a statement. “We must deepen our cooperation with our allies and partners in the Middle East and Europe to take on this threat.”

Trump, meanwhile, suggested the U.S. “fight fire with fire.” He tweeted that the U.S. “must do everything possible” to stop terrorism, even elsewhere.

“We have to be so strong,” Trump told a crowd in Ohio on Tuesday. “We have to fight so viciously, and violently because we’re dealing with violent people viciously.”

After an exhaustive and politically charged investigation that went on for years and cost millions of dollars, Republicans on the House Benghazi committee released a final report Tuesday that shed little new light on the U.S. response to the 2012 attacks in that Libyan city.

The 800-page report, which Democrats on the committee denounced as a sham focused on discrediting Hillary Clinton before it was even released, included no new evidence of wrongdoing by the former secretary of State. Though it argues that the State Department, under her leadership, inadequately protected its staff in Benghazi, its criticism was directed more broadly at the Obama administration.

The report accuses the government of incompetence at various levels, including a failure to deploy needed military assets, CIA intelligence reports that were “rife with errors” and misguided planning, even in the midst of the violence.

“Not a single wheel of a single U.S. military asset had even turned toward Libya,” Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the committee chairman, said Tuesday at a committee news conference on Capitol Hill unveiling the report, making the case that the administration ignored dozens of warning signs that violence was imminent.

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