Obama to join Hillary Clinton in first campaign trail appearance
President Obama will make his first appearance on the 2016 campaign trail with Hillary Clinton next Tuesday, joining the presumptive Democratic nominee at an event in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The campaign announced the event, scheduled for July 5, in a press release early Wednesday morning.
In his June endorsement of the candidate, Mr. Obama showered Clinton -- his one-time rival for the Democratic nomination back in 2008 -- with high praise, telling Americans that "I don't think there's ever been someone so qualified to hold this office."
"I have seen her judgment. I've seen her toughness. I've seen her commitment to our values up close," the president said in his endorsement video. "I'm with her. I am fired up and I cannot wait to get out there and campaign for Hillary."
Soon after Mr. Obama announced his support for Clinton, Donald Trump, the Republican party's presumptive nominee, warned the president against hitting the campaign trail for his rival.
"We have a president that doesn't know what the hell he's doing, folks," Trump said at a Virginia rally earlier this month. "I hear he's going to take a lot of time, during our time, when he's supposed to be looking at trade and the military and all of these things, and he's going to campaign for Crooked Hillary."
"You know what? That's okay. That's okay," Trump said, before he launched into a veiled threat against the president. "Because if he does that, we're allowed to say things about him that normally we wouldn't bring up. Remember when Bill started campaigning?"
Trump was referring to comments he made after ex-President Bill Clinton began stumping for his wife, where Trump called the former chief executive "one of the great abusers of the world" and insinuating that Clinton had been accused of "rape."
It was not clear what things he was intimating he'd say about Mr. Obama "that normally we wouldn't bring up."
The president was previously scheduled to join his former secretary of state in Green Bay, Wisconsin two weeks ago, but a deadly shooting in Orlando, Florida -- which took the lives of 50 people at a gay night club -- prompted the campaign to postpone the event.