Barack Obama said he could have beaten President-elect Donald Trump had he run again, in an interview released Monday.
The U.S. president said his vision for America’s future would have pushed him ahead of Trump.
“I am confident in this vision because I’m confident that if I — if I had run again and articulated it — I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” the president told CNN analyst David Axelrod during an interview on his podcast “The Axe Files”.
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“I know that in conversations that I’ve had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would say the vision, the direction that you point towards is the right one.”
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Obviously Donald Trump caught wind of the interview and issued a tweet Monday afternoon arguing there was “NO WAY!” he would have lost to Obama.
Obama also critiqued Hillary Clinton’s campaign team for acting too cautiously during the election.
“If you think you’re winning, then you have a tendency, just like in sports, maybe to play it safer,” Obama said. The president said Clinton “understandably . . . looked and said, ‘Well, given my opponent and the things he’s saying and what he’s doing, we should focus on that.’”
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Obama also suggested the press had a double standard for Clinton.
“I think that Hillary Clinton performed wonderfully under really tough circumstances. I’ve said this publicly, I’ll repeat it – I think there was a double standard with her. For whatever reason, there’s been a longstanding difficulty in her relationship with the press that meant her flaws were wildly amplified.”
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