President Obama appears to have gone from being amusingly irritated, to genuinely irritated, with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, in the wake of the latter’s fiery rhetoric spoken in the days following what has quickly come to be known as the Orlando massacre.

Following the attack, Trump has been very publicly revisiting controversial ideas about securing the nation that he espoused early on in his campaign, ideas about heavily regulating immigration into the U.S., and even engineering some type of effective ban on Muslims entering the country. On Tuesday, President Obama, in responding to Trump’s latest hits on what the challenger sees as the current administration’s fecklessness on the matter of the terror threat besetting the nation, evidenced a distinct agitation, even outright anger.

Obama seemed especially upset at Trump’s calling out of both the president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for their refusal to use the term “radical Islam” explicitly in discussing the terror threat to the nation, saying on Tuesday, “What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change?”
Continuing, the president said, “Would it make ISIL less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.”

For his part, Trump, speaking at a Greensboro, N.C. rally just a little while after the president’s comments, responded by saying, in part, “He was more angry at me than he was at the shooter. The level of anger, that’s the kind of anger he should have for the shooter and these killers who shouldn’t be here.”

Many observers have long felt that the disinclination on the part of the administration to overtly identify radical Islam as the overriding security threat to the nation is a case of political correctness run amuck, and that this unwillingness has prevented the nation, as a whole, from doing what is necessary to defeat the enemy.

 By Robert G. Yetman, Jr. Editor At Large