In response to a question about criticism of his presidency, Obama said some of that is legitimate and expected but there is some of it that has to do with his “background”. (NYT)
HONOLULU — President Barack Obama, in a broadside against the leading Republican presidential candidate, says billionaire Donald Trump is “exploiting” the fears that working-class men in particular have about the economy and stagnant wages.
The president also said some of the criticism he gets is because he is African American and some people haven’t yet reconciled with the idea of him in the White House.
Obama sat for the interview last Thursday after returning from the National Counterterrorism Center, where he received a pre-holiday briefing on potential threats to the homeland. He said publicly after the briefing that his national security advisers had no specific, credible information suggesting a potential attack against the homeland. Obama left Washington on Friday for two weeks of vacation in his native Hawaii.
Obama told NPR News that criticism of his strategy to combat the Islamic State group was warranted and that the administration’s failure to keep the public informed about his strategy for countering the IS group has contributed to the public’s fears that not enough is being done to protect them.
“I think that there is a legitimate criticism of what I’ve been doing and our administration has been doing in the sense that we haven’t, you know, on a regular basis I think described all the work that we’ve been doing for more than a year now to defeat ISIL,” Obama said, using an acronym for IS.
The group claimed responsibility for an attack in mid-November that killed 130 people in Paris.
U.S. authorities blamed the shooting deaths of 14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, earlier this month on a radicalized married couple who pledged allegiance to an IS leader in a Facebook post after they had opened fire.
Both attacks heightened fears of terrorism in the U.S. and led to widespread criticism of Obama’s response to them.
If people don’t know about the thousands of airstrikes that have been launched against IS targets since August 2014, or aren’t aware that towns in Iraq once controlled by the group have been retaken, “then they might feel as if there’s not enough of a response,” Obama said.
“I think somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that. That’s what he’s exploiting during the course of his campaign.”
Trump’s rise among Republican voters — he has led the field in national polls for months now — has been widely attributed to him tapping into that anger pointed out by Obama.
Trump has called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminal and has called for banning non-American muslims from entering the country, using rhetoric that could have ended another campaign.
Trump has not only survived, but flourished.
In response to a question about criticism of his presidency, Obama said some of that is legitimate and expected but there is some of it that has to do with his “background”.
“If you are referring to specific strains in the Republican Party that suggest that somehow I’m different, I’m Muslim, I’m disloyal to the country, etc. — which unfortunately is pretty far out there, and gets some traction in certain pockets of the Republican Party, and that have been articulated by some of their elected officials — what I’d say there is that that’s probably pretty specific to me, and who I am and my background.… In some ways, I may represent change that worries them.”
“But they can hurt us, and they can hurt our people and our families. And so I understand why people are worried,” he said. “The most damage they can do, though, is if they start changing how we live and what our values are, and part of my message over the next 14 months or 13 months that I remain in office is to just make sure that we remember who we are and make sure that our resilience, our values, our unity are maintained.” - AP
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