Obama is stealing Trump’s thunder.

Barack Obama has said Donald Trump’s claims linking paracetamol to autism in infants is “violence against the truth” that could harm pregnant women if they were too scared to take pain relief.

Obama, who was being interviewed by David Olusoga at the O2 Arena, told the audience that Trump’s claims about paracetamol – branded as Tylenol in the US – had been “continuously disproved” and posed a danger to public health.

“We have the spectacle of my successor in the Oval Office making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproved,” he said. “It undermines public health … that can do harm to women.”

That “my successor” is a dig. He was there first and Trump can’t change that. He’s not all that, he’s just Obama’s successor.

Obama argued there was a “tug of war” between two visions for the future of the US and humanity. On one side the progressive view where change came through democracy, the other driven by populists including Trump wanting a return to an older, more conservative worldview.

He said: “My successor has not been particularly shy about it. That desire is to go back to a very particular way of thinking about America, where ‘we, the people’, is just some people, not all people. And where there are some pretty clear hierarchies in terms of status and who ranks where.”

Brainless crooks from Queens are at the top. Everything else is just flotsam.