State of the Union

College Students Trash Obama Quotes They Thought Were From Trump

Partisan politics is awful.

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Pat Benic/UPI/Newscom

Campus Reform visited John Jay College in New York City to solicit students' opinions about President Donald Trump's first State of the Union address. But they actually read the kids quotes from Barack Obama's State of the Union.

As you'd guess, some students jumped at the chance to slam the comments, and Trump, as "warmongering," "aggressive," and "immature." (A caveat: As always with videos in the Jaywalking genre, it's an open question how many responses ended up on the cutting room floor.)

Responding to a quote about the need to go after ISIS, one student flirted with a bit of America Firstism: "He should, like, you know, mind his own business and, like, just focus on America because he's the president of the United States, not the whole world."

It's an attitude toward interventionism that might have been more popular during the Obama years if Obama weren't so popular himself. U.S. foreign policy, particularly when it comes to the War on Terror, didn't change all that much between George W. Bush and Obama. Were Bush's policies unpopular, or was it just him?

It shouldn't surprise us that partisanship can make people's views so malleable. The evidence is all around us—look no further than Republicans' rapid shift in opinion about the FBI in the wake of the Trump investigation.

Watch the video below, and weep: