Obama was the 44th President of the United States from 2008 until Trump’s shocked victory in 2016. His new book, A promised land, published last Wednesday, traces his rise in politics to the first two and a half years of his two-term presidency.
The book, the first in a two-volume memoir by his presidency, broke records, selling nearly 890,000 copies in the United States and Canada within its first 24 hours.
- Listen to the full interview on The stream on CBC Radio One, Monday at 8:37 a.m., online or on the CBC Listen application.
Obama a dit The streamThe host, Matt Galloway, said that healing the divisions will be especially difficult for a Democratic president because “the media burst has created a great ecosystem of conservative media that is very difficult to penetrate.”
“If this is your source for what’s going on in the outside world, then you would think that Donald Trump not only did a great job as president, but you would think there is merit in taking the positions he takes, ”Obama said.
He warned that it is important for Democrats to try to understand why people voted for Trump, because it will be “difficult to do great things if the country is so polarized.”
“How to bridge this gap between those who strongly opposed this president and those who still support him will be a big challenge,” he said.
“There are all kinds of ways in which a determined opposition can block everything, not just certain things. So I think Joe is going to have to try to come up with areas of potential compromise. ”
WATCH | Biden must tap into “areas of potential compromise”:
Former US President Barack Obama said in an interview with The Current that President-elect Joe Biden’s first job will be to heal the country’s deep divisions, which go beyond the recent elections. 3:45
Failure to lead
When asked if, as the country’s first black president, he viewed his successor, Donald Trump, as racist, Obama said what was important was that Trump was “more than happy to stir up racist feelings ”during his four years in power. Whether or not he personally believed the rhetoric didn’t matter, he said.
“I’m not interested in what’s in his heart. I’m interested in what he’s doing, ”Obama said.
“Whether he’s cynically riding this wave to get his way or whether it taps into something he actually believes in, here’s what I can say with certainty: that he doesn’t consider it his job to struggle. against racist feelings.
“This, to me, is a failure of any leader. ”
He said that during Trump’s tenure rhetoric that had been relegated to the fringes of the Republican Party had moved “to the fore.”
“This fear of the other, this suggestion that there are sort of real Americans and then there are people who I guess are fake Americans,” he said.
“And one way or another, fake Americans tend to be like me. ”
WATCH | Trump “more than happy to stir up racist feelings”: Obama
Former US President Barack Obama said in an interview with CBC’s The Current that while he can’t tell if Donald Trump is racist at heart, the current president loves racist sentiments and is “cynically riding this wave. to arrive at his ends”. 4:43
Advice on the sidelines
Four years after leaving office, Obama said he lacked the camaraderie, teamwork and “mental exercise of solving difficult political problems” – but not the pomp of the presidency.
Someone once asked him if he would serve a third term if he could.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to be up front,” he said.
“But if someone had said, you can sit in your basement in your hoodies, and there’s somebody else playing the speaker with a microphone in your ear, and you can just give suggestions and a policy – so I could have appreciated doing that. ”
WATCH | What Obama is missing from the presidency:
Former US President Barack Obama doesn’t miss the glitz of the office, but joked in an interview with CBC’s The Current that he’d like to be the virus in the president’s ear, offering real-time advice from his basement. 2:15
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