President Obama argued Tuesday that most Americans “agreed with my world view,” even though Donald Trump won the presidency.
“I think the policies we put forward were the right ones,” Obama told reporters at a joint press conference in Athens, Greece, with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.
“The country is indisputably better off. Those folks who voted for the president-elect are better off than they were when I came into office for the most part. But we’ll see whether those facts affect people’s calculations in the next election.”
Without addressing Hillary Clinton’s failure to capitalize on his successes directly, Obama pointed to his high poll numbers as affirmation that “the majority of Americans agreed with my worldview.”
The unexpected Trump election could signal that Americans just wanted to “shake things up” after eight years, he said.
Obama conceded that Trump had tapped into voter concerns about a fast-changing world.
“Globalization combined with technology combined with social media and constant information have disrupted people’s lives, sometimes in very concrete ways,” the president said.
“When you see a Donald Trump and a Bernie Sanders, very unconventional candidates, having considerable success, then obviously there is something there that is being tapped into — a suspicion of globalization. A desire to rein in its excesses.”
But Obama urged the world to guard against a crude sense of nationalism and tribalism.
“We know what happens when Europeans start dividing themselves up and emphasizing their differences and seeing a competition between various countries in a zero-sum way,” he said. “The 20th century was a bloodbath.”
Tsipras said he hasn’t joined some other European leaders in criticizing Trump, saying that the Republican’s “aggressive manner” as a candidate might change when he becomes president.
“In the near future, not much is going to change in the relations between the EU, Greece and the United States of America,” he predicted.
Tsipras also said he knows little about Trump and has been urged to read his book “The Art of the Deal” to better understand the president-elect.
Obama was making the first visit to Greece by a sitting US president since Bill Clinton in 1999.
With Post Wires