White House Obama says he may take on Trump The president refuses to say he’d hold to the tradition of avoiding public comment or political attacks on the successor.

President Barack Obama on Sunday started mapping out his vision of Democrats’ path back — and all but pledged to be part of it himself.

In his fourth news conference in a week of sounding out to Americans and world leaders what he thinks they should think about President-elect Donald Trump, Obama urged congressional Democrats not to follow Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) model of lockstep resistance against him eight years ago, but to quickly activate all over the country and avoid “micro-targeting.”


This came as Obama expressed a version of confidence about Trump that on Sunday had him saying, “reality will force him to adjust how he approaches many of these issues,” even as he revealed that he’d told the president-elect in their post-election Oval Office meeting to hire “a strong White House counsel” to help prevent the conflict-of-interest and corruption issues that many see potentially starting to take shape as Trump and his children continue to mix business dealings and transition policy decisions.

And though Obama said he wouldn’t get involved in every fight — including some fights likely to be about Trump and the Republican majorities in Congress ripping out his legacy — he very deliberately refused to say he’d hold to the tradition of presidents avoiding public comment or political attacks on their successors.

“I want to be respectful of the office and give the president-elect an opportunity to put forward his platform and his arguments without somebody popping off in every instance,” Obama said, but “as an American citizen who cares deeply about our country, if there are issues that have less to do with the specifics of some legislative proposal or battle but go to core questions about our values and our ideals, and if I think that it’s necessary or helpful for me to defend those ideals, then I’ll examine it when it comes.”

Obama was speaking at a news conference in Peru just before flying back from a weeklong foreign trip that he said was “likely” his last as president (a potential shift, as he and aides had until Sunday been definitive in calling this his last foreign trip), at the end of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit where he’d met with, among others, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese President Shinzo Abe, who have all had different interests in the election results.

Obama’s refusal to sit back will be welcome news to many Democrats who are searching for party leadership and who are still largely in love with him. But his advice about not waging all-out war on Trump and the Republicans isn’t what many in the shell-shocked party want to hear.

Obama said of the new administration and Congress, “give them a hearing.” Earlier in the news conference, Obama said “people should take a wait-and-see approach” on Trump.

Many Democrats feel like they’ve heard and seen enough already. But Obama, as he often does, urged a long view over immediate political satisfaction.

“My advice to Democrats is, know what you care about and what you stand for and fight for your principles, even if it’s a hard fight. If there are areas where the new administration is doing something that’s good for the American people, find a way to work with them,” he said.

The situation is dire, and potentially generational: Democrats head into 2018 facing not just the usual expected midterm turnout problems but also a Senate map that has them so much on defense that they struggled to find someone to chair the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. That, though, is only part of their problems: Starting from deep in the hole across the country, they’ll need to win governors' races and state legislature seats in order to stop Republicans from gerrymandering them further into the permanent minority in the next round of redistricting following the 2020 Census.

And then there’s the fact that four years out from the next presidential election, there isn’t a single clear candidate to take on Trump — a fact that Obama has dismissed in recent days as mirroring where the party stood after the 2004 elections, but doesn’t account for the fact that already by the time John Kerry conceded, Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were already among the national figures expected to run.

But don’t despair, Obama said, pointing out that Clinton won the popular vote this year and that Democrats continue to get more cumulative votes in congressional elections, though the structure of the system means that’s not necessarily helpful for the Electoral College or congressional representation. On top of that, Obama noted, his own approval rating remains high, and a Gallup poll just out shows higher approval numbers for the Democratic Party than the GOP.

“I’m not worried about being the last Democratic president — not even for a while,” Obama said, batting back one reporter’s question.

All year long, as he pushed hard for Clinton, Obama privately expressed anxiety that though he assumed she’d win, she’d come in without any wind at her back for getting anything done. In the past week, he’s made several public comments implicitly knocking her campaign strategy as too narrowly focused on base turnout, letting Trump run up the score elsewhere in ways that she wasn’t able to overcome. The dynamics of Clinton’s narrow losses in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — if she’d won all three, she’d be the president-elect — can be seen as telling that story.

Rather than over-read the election results and call for a “complete overhaul,” Obama said, he urged his party to get smarter. This comes, though, after eight years of many Democratic leaders complaining that Obama never seemed committed to or interested in electing down-ballot Democrats, and as his White House systematically atrophied the Democratic National Committee party apparatus. Obama’s own Organizing for Action group, grown out of his presidential campaign structure, has not emerged into anything like the force expected.

“Doing better involves us working at the grass roots, not ceding territory, going out into areas where right now we may not stand a chance of actually winning, we’re building up a cadre of young talent, we’re making arguments, we’re persuading, we’re talking about the things that matter to ordinary people day-to-day and trying to avoid some of the constant distractions that fill up people’s Twitter accounts,” Obama said. “If we do that, then I’m confident that we’ll be back on track.”