This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Barack Obama thinks Donald Trump is “very engaging and gregarious” and “not lacking in confidence”, to the point where he may have “enough craziness to think [he] can do the job”. But he won’t say if he likes him.

The US president spoke to ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos, in a wide-ranging interview that was recorded on Friday.



The conversation included reflections on Obama’s time in the White House, which ends with Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, his achievements and disappointments in domestic and foreign policy and his expectations regarding his legacy.

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Asked if he thinks his Obamacare health reform, his chief domestic achievement, will survive a Trump presidency and a Republican-controlled Congress, he said: “I think it will.”

Questioned about the president-elect’s controversial attitude to intelligence agencies’ belief that Russia intervened in the US election on his behalf, and favourable statements about Russia and its president, Obama counselled trust in such agencies.

“We have to remind ourselves we’re on the same team,” he said. “Vladimir Putin’s not on our team.”

Stephanopoulos asked Obama what he had tried to impress on Trump since the Republican’s victory over Hillary Clinton in November.

“The conversations have been cordial,” Obama said. “He has been open to suggestions, and the main thing that I’ve tried to transmit is that there’s a difference between governing and campaigning.”



Trump has spoken favourably of such conversations with Obama, although he also said, in a typically incautious tweet, that he was trying “to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks. Thought it was going to be a smooth transition - NOT!”

Obama, speaking in his familiar measured tones, said Trump would soon be in charge of “the largest organisation on earth” which he would not be able to “manage [in] the way you would manage a family business”.

Trump is due to hold a press conference – his first since July – on Wednesday, to outline ways in which he intends to lessen or avoid conflicts of interest between his business empire, members of his family and his new political role.

Stephanopoulos asked how Trump had impressed Obama so far.

“You know,” the president said, “he is somebody who I think is very engaging and gregarious.”



Do you like him, Stephanopoulos asked.

“You know, I’ve enjoyed the conversations that we’ve had,” Obama said. “He is somebody who I think is not lacking in confidence, which is … probably a prerequisite for the job, or at least you have to have enough craziness to think that you can do the job.

“I think that he has not spent a lot of time sweating the details of, you know, all the policies…”

Asked if that worried him, Obama said he saw himself “more at the policy wonk end of the spectrum”, and said a lack of familiarity with policy details could be “both a strength and a weakness” for Trump.

“I think it’s fair to say that he and I are … sort of opposites in some ways,” he added.

Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act has come to be known, stands as Obama’s foremost domestic policy achievement, according to the administration having helped more than 20 million people gain health insurance coverage.

Republicans in Congress will move to repeal the act, but that will not be without political cost and debate continues over how, when or if they will replace it. Trump has advocated repeal but his position on a replacement remains unclear.

On Friday, Kentucky senator Rand Paul said he had spoken to the president-elect, who favoured an instant replacement. On Sunday, incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus told CBS it would be “ideal” if repeal and replacement could be achieved “in one big action”.

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told the same channel there “ought not to be a great gap between the first step and the second”.

Asked if he thought Obamacare would survive, the president said: “I think it will. Or … it may be called something else.”

Speaking to Vox in Washington earlier on Friday, he said he would back a Republican healthcare plan if it was “demonstrably” better than his.

Speaking to ABC, he said: “I’m skeptical that they can do it mainly because for seven years now, including when we first tried to pass healthcare, I said to ’em, ‘OK, if this doesn’t work tell me what does.’”

Trump has nominated a cabinet full of opponents of Obama policies, on education, energy, environmental issues and more. The president said he hoped nonetheless that Republicans would not “just oppose things because, ‘this was Obama’s agenda.’”

“That’s what’s happening at the moment,” he conceded.

Regarding the Democratic party’s collapse in Congress and the states during his time in the White House, Obama said: “I take some responsibility on that.”

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He became president at the height of a world economic crisis that continued in the first years of his administration, he said, affecting Democratic electoral fortunes. The effort to rebuild the party was “something that I have an interest in”, he said.

“I started as a community organiser,” Obama said. “Every one of my campaigns was premised on getting new people involved. And if there’s a theme in my public career it’s that if ordinary people get involved then good things happen. So I want to see the Democratic party move in that direction.”

Stephanopoulos also asked Obama if he thought Trump’s use of Twitter, which aides have said is likely to continue once he is in the White House, was a good idea.

“Clearly this worked for him,” he said, “and it gives him a direct connection to a lot of the people that voted for him.



“I’ve said to him, and I think others have said to him that the day that he is the president of the United States, there are world capitals and financial markets and people all around the world who take really seriously what he says, and in a way that’s just not true before you’re actually sworn in as president.”