Former President Barack Obama held a secret meeting shortly before he left office where he complimented President Donald Trump and scolded Hillary Clinton and the liberal media, newly unsealed documents have revealed.
The transcript from the secret meeting Obama had with the media has just been released after a Bloomberg reporter made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
In the meeting, Obama blasted Hillary for not going to key midwestern states or a union hall during her 2016 presidential campaign.
He also takes some veiled shots at Trump before complimenting the 45th president.
Obama’s comments about Trump paint a very different picture of his feelings toward his successor than the hysteria from Democrats being played out in the media after the 2016 election.
A portion of the transcript reads:
Q So, I’ve been sort of trying to figure out how pessimistic you are.
THE PRESIDENT: My actual views are not wildly far off from what I’ve said publicly. I’ve tempered my language and tried to be diplomatic about it. I am a genuine optimist in the sense that, number one, I think it’s important for us not to ignore the multiple contingencies that resulted in Trump being elected and not somehow suggest that the country is invariably racist, misogynist, what have you.
And the fact of the matter is, setting aside that Hillary Clinton got the substantially bigger share of the vote, I think it’s fair to say that a whole series of different things happening — how the email thing unfolded, and sort of the chain from Bill Clinton getting on that plane, to Comey making an announcement.
At a bunch of different junctures, people could have made different decisions that would have resulted in it playing differently. I think the Russian leaks, how that played out, how all this stuff was reported — I mean, I’m just being honest with you, and many of you share this view. You guys weren’t necessarily the culprits, but how that played out.
Some failures of polling and analytics leading a leading Democratic candidate never to appear in Michigan or Wisconsin, or show up in a union hall, right? I mean, there’s just a bunch of stuff that could have happened in which we wouldn’t be having this particular conversation.
So, A, I think it’s important not to over-interpret where the minds of the American people are at.
His interactions with me (Trump) are very different than they are with the public, or, for that matter, interactions with Barack Obama, the distant figure. He’s very polite to me, and has not stopped being so.
I think where he sees a vulnerability he goes after it and he takes advantage of it.
And the fact of the matter is that the media is not credible in the public eye right now.
You have a bigger problem with a breakdown in institutional credibility that he exploits, at least for his base, and is sufficient for his purposes.
Which means that — the one piece of advice I’d give this table is: Focus. I think if you’re jumping after every insult or terrible thing or bit of rudeness that he’s doing and just chasing that, I think there’s a little bit of a three-card Monte there that you have to be careful about.
I think you have to focus on a couple of things that are really important and just stay on them and drive them home.
And that’s hard to do in this news environment, and it’s hard to do with somebody who, I think, purposely generates outrage both to stir up his base but also to distract and to — so you just have to stay focused and unintimidated, because that’s how you confront, I think, a certain personality type.
But in terms of the world — look, rather than pick at one or two different things — number one, I don’t think he’s particularly isolationist — or I don’t think he’s particularly interventionist.
I’m less worried than some that he initiates a war. I think that he could stumble into stuff just due to a lack of an infrastructure and sort of a coherent vision.
But I think his basic view — his formative view of foreign policy is shaped by his interactions with Malaysian developers and Saudi princes, and I think his view is, I’m going to go around the world making deals and maybe suing people. (Laughter.) But it’s not, let me launch big wars that tie me up. And that’s not what his base is looking from him anyway.
I mean, it is not true that he initially opposed the war in Iraq. It is true that during the campaign he was not projecting a hawkish foreign policy, other than bombing the heck out of terrorists. And we’ll see what that means, but I don’t think he’s looking to get into these big foreign adventures.
See the full transcript here.
Obama said in these previously unpublished remarks that he didn’t believe Trump was particularly interested in starting any wars other than “bombing the heck out of terrorists.”
This is what Obama thought about Trump’s view of foreign policy pic.twitter.com/9iTHQi1ivm
— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) September 30, 2022
For all of Trump’s harsh criticisms about Obama, the 44th president said Trump’s public persona was radically different than in his private interactions.
This is what he said. pic.twitter.com/JPOMWTsefO
— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) September 30, 2022
