President Obama said Fox News and conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh helped to convert some of his former supporters into fans of President-elect Trump by creating a caricature of Obama.
“When people criticize or respond negatively to me, usually they’re responding to this character that they’re seeing on TV called Barack Obama, or to the office of the presidency and the White House and what that represents. And so you don’t take it personally,” Obama said during an October interview with the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates that was published Wednesday.
“You understand that if people are angry that somehow the government is failing, then they are going to look to the guy who represents government. And that applies, by the way, even to some of the folks who are now Trump supporters,” Obama said. “They’re responding to a fictional character named Barack Obama who they see on Fox News or who they hear about through Rush Limbaugh.”
During the far-reaching interview, Obama said he understood the intellectual argument for slavery reparations but argued policies that required a large payment to the African-American community would be difficult to pass through Congress.
Even so, the president said he hoped people would consider the implications slavery and racism still has for the standing of today’s African-Americans.
“I want Malia and Sasha — to understand that they’ve got responsibilities beyond just what they themselves have done,” Obama said of his daughters. “That they have a responsibility to the larger community and the larger nation, that they should be sensitive to and extra thoughtful about the plight of people who have been oppressed in the past, are oppressed currently.”
“[I]t’s my view that there is a certain percentage of the white population that stereotypes and makes assumptions about African Americans because they don’t inject the history of slavery and Jim Crow into current incarceration rates, or crime rates, or poverty rates, or what have you,” Obama added. “But if they started having more middle-class black kids who are friends with their kids, eating Cheerios in their kitchen, their attitudes start changing.”
