President Barack Obama speaks during the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia , Wednesday, July 27, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
(CNSNews.com) – In a term evidently aimed at Donald Trump, President Obama said Wednesday night that “homegrown demagogues” – along with fascists, communists and jihadists – threaten American values but would ultimately fail.
In a speech at the Democratic National Convention in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations, Obama said that America has changed, but what makes Americans American was not where they came from or looked like but – pointing to his chest – “what’s in here.”
“That’s what matters. That’s why we can take the food and music and holidays and styles of other countries, and blend it into something uniquely our own,” he said.
“That’s why we can attract strivers and entrepreneurs from around the globe to build new factories and create new industries here. That’s why our military can look the way it does – every shade of humanity, forged into common service.
“That’s why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.”
“Homegrown demagogue” quickly began trending on social media, and some Twitter users described it as the most effective epithet yet to feature in the 2016 campaign.
The term has been used before for Trump. Earlier Wednesday, U.S. News and World Report published an op-ed by Andrew Borene, a fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, which included the line “most mainstream Republicans now see nothing short of a frightening homegrown demagogue in Trump’s bigoted rhetoric.”
And on Twitter, back in December 2015, New York Times contributor Jacques Leslie, pointing to a NYT article analyzing 95,000 words from Trump speeches over the previous five months, tweeted, “Our homegrown demagogue.”
A month later, Twitter user Rulon James Downard wrote of Trump, “he’s a homegrown demagogue, in the tradition of Rush Limbaugh or Father Coughlin.”
President Barack Obama speaks during the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia , Wednesday, July 27, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) 
