Donald Trump celebrated his 70th birthday in North Carolina with a serenade from an estimated 9,000 people and a vicious rebuttal to an afternoon of attacks lodged by Hillary Clinton and the president they both hope to replace.
‘Happy birthday? Ah, don’t tell me about my birthday!’ he grinned as the singing started.
Trump’s smile turned quickly into a pointed glare, though, as he blamed ‘weak, ineffective people’ in President Barack Obama’s administration for what he said was an out-of-control immigration problem linked to the weekend’s gun massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
In a rare break from the no-drama-Obama voters have come to expect, the president unleashed an angry lecture on Trump in the afternoon, painting him as a know-nothing poseur whose lack of nuanced foreign policy knowledge and china-shop-bull approach to diplomacy would threaten to turn the Arab world against Americans and radicalize a new generation of Islamist jihadis.