Trump uses out-of-context line to hit Michelle Obama

by Ben Kamisar - 10/21/16 1:45 PM ET

Trump comments on FLOTUS as surrogate for Clinton: "His wife, all she wants to do is campaign…" pic.twitter.com/9rp9SeKX1C

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) October 21, 2016

Donald Trump took a swipe at first lady Michelle Obama by accusing her of disparaging Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic primaries between Clinton and then-Sen. Barack Obama.

{mosads}”We have a bunch of babies running our country, a bunch of losers. They are babies. We have a president, all he wants to do is campaign. His wife, all she wants to do is campaign,” Trump said during a rally Friday in North Carolina.

“I see how much his wife likes Hillary, but wasn’t she the one that started the statement: ‘If you can’t take care of your home, you can’t take care of the White House or the country’?”

The GOP presidential nominee was referring to comments Michelle Obama made while stumping for her husband in 2007 that could have been seen as an attack on Clinton when viewed out of context. But the entire section of Michelle Obama’s old remarks makes that connection less clear.

Obama made those comments a number of times on the stump for her husband. But according to a transcript in an analysis by PolitiFact, she followed those comments immediately by discussing the trade-offs her own family had to make during the presidential campaign.

“Our view was that, if you can’t run your own house, you certainly can’t run the White House. So, so we’ve adjusted our schedules to make sure that our girls are first, so while he’s traveling around, I do day trips,” she said.

“They just know that I was at home to tuck them in at night, and it keeps them grounded, and, and children, the children in our country have to know that they come first. And our girls do, and that’s why we’re doing this. We’re in this race for not just our children, but all of our children.”

The first lady, whose popularity hit 64 percent in August, has emerged as a vocal Trump opponent as she devotes more time to the stump in the race’s final month. She’s seized on the recent video released of Trump talking in 2005 about groping women without consent to hammer the GOP nominee and call for people to support Clinton, his Democratic opponent.

Tags Barack Obama Donald Trump Hillary Clinton Michelle Obama