President: Economic fears used by Trump
HONOLULU — President Barack Obama said in a radio interview released Monday that billionaire GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump is “exploiting” the fears that working-class men in particular have about the economy and stagnant wages.
In a year-end interview on NPR News with Steve Inskeep, Obama said demographic changes combined with the “economic stresses” people have been feeling because of the financial crisis, technology and globalization have made life harder for those who rely on a steady paycheck.
“Particularly 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,” Obama said. “You combine
those things, and it means that there is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear. Some of it justified but just misdirected.
“I think somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that. That’s what he’s exploiting during the course of his campaign,” Obama said.
Trump has called for temporarily banning Muslims from entering the U.S. and has made inflammatory comments about Hispanics and others.
Obama has mostly refrained from weighing in directly on the 2016 campaign as he focuses on his policy agenda, but his aides have criticized Trump. White House spokesman Josh Earnest called Trump a “carnival barker” whose proposal regarding Muslims disqualifies him from being president.
Obama sat for the interview 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. Obama left Washington on Friday for two weeks of vacation in his native Hawaii.
Inskeep asked the president whether he believed he understood the anxieties of ordinary Americans who fear the direction that he is attempting to steer the United States. Obama interpreted the question to be about whether racial fears of him as the nation’s first black president had produced
unique opposition to his presidency, but Inskeep suggested he meant broader anxieties.
“If what you are suggesting is that, you know, somebody questioning whether I was born in the United States or not, how do I think about that,” Obama said, “I would say that that’s something that is actively promoted and may gain traction because of my unique demographic. I don’t think that that’s a big stretch.”
Inskeep replied that the president had been criticized during his 2008 campaign after a recording of remarks he made at a private fundraiser, in which he said some working-class Americans were bitter and were “clinging to guns and religion,” was made public.
Obama noted that he was elected twice by sizable majorities and said, “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, and that in some ways I may represent change that worries them.”
STRATEGY DEFENDED
Obama told Inskeep that criticism of his strategy to combat the Islamic State was warranted and that the administration’s failure to keep the public informed about his strategy for countering the militant group has contributed to Americans’ fears that not enough is being done to protect them.
At the same time, Obama said his strategy in the Middle East took the best course of action suited to the United States’ resources and perceived obligations in the world.
“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 the Islamic State.
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, Calif., earlier this month on a radicalized married couple who pledged allegiance to an Islamic State 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.
Obama said that if people don’t know about the thousands of airstrikes that have been launched against Islamic State 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.”
“And so part of our goal here is to make sure that people are informed about all the actions that we’re taking,” he said.
Obama outlined the strategy against the Islamic State in a nationally televised address from the Oval Office on Dec. 6, days after the San Bernardino shooting. Before leaving for vacation, Obama also tried to soothe public anxiety about attacks in the U.S. through a series of public appearances with members of his national security team after separate briefings on the Islamic State and on potential threats to the U.S.
Obama continued to defend his approach to threats from Islamic State jihadis, who control large parts of Iraq and Syria.
“I make no apologies for us wanting to do this appropriately and in a way that is consistent with American values,” he said.
“What I would say to my successor is that it is important not just to shoot but to aim,” Obama said. “And it is important in this seat to make sure that you are making your best judgments based on data, intelligence, the information that’s coming from your commanders and folks on the ground, and you’re not being swayed by politics.”
Obama also criticized Republican calls for “carpet bombing” the Islamic State in the Middle East, and he continued to reject calls for a no-fly zone in Syria that have been supported by a number of those aspiring to the Oval Office, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
“Who is it you are going to bomb? Where is it that you are going to bomb?” Obama said. “When you talk about something like carpet bombing, what do you mean?”
Obama said his administration is carrying out “precision
strikes” on the Islamic State based on intelligence and that “if the suggestion is that we kill tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians and Iraqis, that is not who we are and that would be a strategy that would have enormous backlash against the United States. It would be terrible for our national security.”
Obama said that while some variation of a no-fly zone in Syria has been under consideration for more than three years, “the challenge there is that ISIL doesn’t have an air force, so the damage done there is not against ISIL, it’s against the Syrian regime.”
Without a large number of troops on the ground, “it’s hard to create a safe zone,” he said. And “that doesn’t solve the ISIL problem.”
Asked about the public debate over whether to allow Muslim refugees from Syria into the country, Obama said the larger question of what kind of nation the U.S. should be “never went away.”
“That’s part of the American experience,” Obama said. “Pick any decade and this question’s been wrestled with. This has been true since the founding.”
In the interview, Obama urged keeping the situation in perspective, saying the Islamic State “is not an organization that can destroy the United States.”
“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.”
“If we do that, then ISIL will be defeated,” Obama said.
Information for this article was contributed by Darlene Superville of The Associated Press; by David Nakamura of The Washington Post; and by Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News.