Obama says Trump exploiting 'blue-collar' fears
President Barack Obama on Monday aired his most candid assessment to date about Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, charging in a radio interview the billionaire businessman was capitalizing on economic fears of white men to fuel his presidential campaign.
Offering
his first explicit reaction to Trump since the candidate proposed a ban
on all Muslims entering the country, Obama said such ideas are a
blatant appeal to Americans' fears. Describing in general the reflexive
opposition to his agenda from Republicans, Obama argued that some of
that enmity was rooted in his position as the first African-American
president.
"Blue-collar men have had a
lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting
the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and
able to support their families on a single paycheck," he told National
Public Radio in an interview taped before he departed for his winter
vacation in Hawaii.
"There is going to
be potential anger, frustratio n, fear. Some of it justified, but just
misdirected. I think somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of
that," Obama said. "That's what he's exploiting during the course of his
campaign."
Speaking more broadly --
and not explicitly about Trump -- Obama identified elements of
Republican antagonism that he said could be fueled by ingrained
resistance to an African-American commander in chief, citing "specific
strains in the Republican Party that suggest that somehow I'm different,
I'm Muslim, I'm disloyal to the country."
"In some ways, I may represent change that worries them," he said.
"I
think if you are talking about the specific virulence of some of the
opposition directed towards me, then, you know, that may be explained by
the particulars of who I am," he added later.
The
President acknowledged earlier in the sit-down interview that his
administration may have fumbled its anti-ISIS communications strategy,
but he insisted the plan itself was working and suggested saturated
media coverage of the group could be fueling terror fears in the United
States.
In the past few weeks, the
White House has sought to step up its messaging efforts on
counterterrorism, scheduling a prime-time television address and visits
to the Pentagon and National Counterterrorism Center in an attempt to
better explain progress made against the Islamic State group.
But
Obama conceded those efforts, prompted by an ISIS-inspired attack that
killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, came after inadequate
efforts to relay the work of a U.S.-led coalition in combating ISIS.
"We
haven't 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 told NPR in
an interview taped before he departed for his holiday vacation in
Hawaii. He called the communications blunder a "legitimate criticism of
what I've been doing and our administration has been doing."
But
he also pinned Americans' renewed unease about terror attacks on U.S.
soil to blanket media coverage of ISIS attacks. The November ISIS
terrorist massacre in Paris, which left 130 people dead, led to "a
saturation of news about the horrible attack there," Obama said in the
interview.
"If
you've been watching television for the last month, all you have been
seeing, all you have been hearing about is these guys with masks or
black flags who are potentially coming to get you," he said in the NPR
interview. "So I understand why people are concerned about it."
"Look,
the media is pursuing ratings," he added later. "This is a legitimate
news story. I think that, you know, it's up to the media to make a
determination about how they want to cover things."
No comments:
Post a Comment