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Donald Trump in Manhattan.
"I watched the president, and sometimes the words are okay, but you just look at the body language - there's something going on. There's something going on. And the words are not often okay, by the way," Trump said on "Fox & Friends."
When pressed to clarify what he meant, Trump said that he had "a lot of bad feeling about [Obama]."
The real-estate magnate quickly acknowledged, though, that many black Americans likely have experiences with law enforcement officers that many white Americans can't understand.
"It's probably something that we really don't know, and maybe we can't feel it unless we're black. And it is definitely something going on there too. And that has to do with training, and has to do with something," Trump said.
"But there's something going on, and maybe we can't recognize it unless you're black."
On Sunday, three officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in what the mayor described as an ambush-style attack. Earlier this month, five officers were killed by a sniper in Dallas, Texas.
Trump's accusation that "something is going on" has become a favorite refrain when questioning the motives of other high profile figures.
Following an ISIS-inspired attack at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando earlier this year, the real-estate magnate asserted that Obama may be sympathetic to the terrorist organization, claiming that there was "something going on" with the president's response to terror attacks.