https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/17/president-obama-i-would-have-loved-to-run-against-donald-trump-that-wouldve-been-fun/by Juliet Eilperin November 17 at 12:01 PM
In the homestretch of his presidency, President Obama says his administration is still looking at "a few more" executive actions on guns -- and that he would have liked to run against a vocal Second Amendment supporter: Donald Trump.
Obama ordered his aides in the wake of the Oct. 1 shooting at Oregon's Umpqua Community College to reexamine whether the administration could take any other unilateral actions to curb gun violence: one of the proposals they are examining most closely is a plan to impose new background-check requirements for buyers who purchase weapons from high-volume gun dealers.
In an interview with GQ magazine published Tuesday, the president emphasized that his administration has already undertaken 23 separate actions in the wake of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
"So we haven’t been asleep at the switch in terms of executive actions that we’ve tried," he told longtime sports analyst Bill Simmons, who recently joined HBO to start his own show. "There are maybe a few more that had to be scrubbed by lawyers because essentially, with every executive action, we can count on it being challenged by somebody in Congress or, in this case, the NRA. We want to make any executive action we take as defensible as possible legally."
Obama's remarks -- part of GQ's "Men of the Year" issue -- come shortly after groups of gun owners and shooting survivors have delivered petitions with a million signatures calling for stricter federal controls on Capitol Hill. MoveOn.org has brought 15 gun owners to Washington this week to meet with lawmakers as well as White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett on the issue.
Valerie Jarrett
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@vj44
Great meeting with responsible gun owners - @POTUS asked for their help and they stepped up #StopGunViolence
12:02 PM - 17 Nov 2015
In the issue, Simmons remarked that when it comes to the issue of gun violence, "It does feel like it's going to become the dominant issue of year eight."
"I hope so," Obama replied. "We have this weird habit in this culture of mourning and, you know, 48, 72 hours of wall-to-wall coverage, and then…suddenly we move on. And I will do everything I can to make sure that there’s a sustained attention paid to this thing."
Someone who knows how to grab sustained attention: GOP front-runner Donald Trump. "I would've enjoyed campaigning against Trump," Obama told Simmons. "That would've been fun."
Among other revelations in the interview, Obama also compares himself to Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers ("you've got to be looking downfield"), dishes on his favorite golf reality show ("Big Break") and muses over which sports commissioner he'd like to be ("Well, I’m best suited for basketball. But I cannot believe that the commissioner of football gets paid $44 million a year.")
And for those wondering which Obama conspiracy theory ranks as the president's personal favorite, he named that too: "That military exercises we were doing in Texas were designed to begin martial law so that I could usurp the Constitution and stay in power longer. Anybody who thinks I could get away with telling Michelle I’m going to be president any longer than eight years does not know my wife."
