President Barack Obama stated the obvious when he answered a question on the Republican presidential race and its frontrunner at a Tuesday press conference.
"I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be president," Obama said at a news conference in California after a meeting with southeast Asian leaders. "And the reason is that I have a lot of faith in the American people. Being president is a serious job. It's not hosting a talk show, or a reality show."
He went on: "It's not promotion, it's not marketing. It's hard. And a lot of people count on us getting it right." […]
The presidency isn't "a matter of pandering and doing whatever will get you in the news on a given day. And sometimes, it requires you making hard decisions even when people don't like it," Obama said, adding that whoever succeeds him needs to be able to reflect the importance of their office and give foreign leaders confidence he or she knows their names and something about their nations' histories. […]
"Whoever's standing where I'm standing right now has the nuclear codes with them, and can order 21-year-olds into a firefight, and (has) to make sure that the banking system doesn't collapse, and is often responsible for not just the United States of America, but 20 other countries that are having big problems, or are falling apart and are gonna be looking for us to something."
He added: "The American people are pretty sensible, and I think they'll make a sensible choice in the end."
That pretty much sums up what a president should be able to manage. So of course Donald Trump took umbrage (even though his name was never actually uttered in Obama's remarks) in his usual, totally unpresidential way by insulting the president on Twitter. "Interesting how President Obama so haltingly said I 'would never be president' - This from perhaps the worst president in U.S. history," he tweeted, before adding at a campaign event that being "attacked" by Obama was "a great compliment," and that Obama was "lucky I didn't run last time when Romney ran because you would have been a one-term president." So there.
Note that Trump didn't address the substance of Obama's critique, that a president has to be able to do serious, consequential stuff. Because if you're a Republican, you can be the frontrunner without having to demonstrate that you're actually qualified to be president.