President Obama acknowledged that Donald Trump has given voice to legitimate concerns, but added he’s optimistic younger generations of Americans will soon rise up and reject the sort of stuff being pushed by the GOP nominee.
Obama’s comment came in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that aired Sunday.
“I’m wondering what you make of [the 2016 election], because, you know, you’ve written in the past that you’re — the Kansas side of your family is white working class, Scotch-Irish,” the CNN anchor said.
“These are the people who support Trump,” he said. “These are the people who seem to have the most suspicion about you. What do you make of that?”
Obama responded, and said, “there’s a long tradition in the United States of inclusion, diversity, but also people, once they’re included in what they consider to be the real America, worrying about outsiders contaminating, polluting, messing up a good thing. That’s not new. That dates back to, uh, you know, the — the beginning of this country.”
“And what I’m always reminding people is that, although you’ll see bumps, whether it’s the Know Nothings or, you know, other spasms of anti-immigrant sentiment directed at the Irish or Southern Europeans as opposed to Northern Europeans, or the Chinese, or today, Latinos or Muslims, the long-term trend is people get absorbed, people get assimilated and we benefit from this incredible country in which the measure of your patriotism and how American you are is not the color of your skin, your last name, your faith, but rather your adherence to a creed, your belief in — in certain principles and values,” the president said.
That’s not going to change any time soon just because Trump has managed to energize some of the more anti-immigrant voices in the crowd, he added.
“I don’t expect that that’s going to change simply because Mr. Trump has gotten a little more attention than usual,” Obama said.
“If you look at the current polls, they’re — you know, he’s been able to appeal to a certain group of folks who feel left out or are worried about the rapidity of demographic change, social change, who, in some cases, have very legitimate concerns around the economy and feeling left behind,” he said, adding that these people do not represent the majority of the United States.
The younger generations of Americans, he explained, totally reject the sort of stuff being pushed by Trump.
Nevertheless, Trump must be taken seriously, he said.
“I think that any time we hear intolerance, any time that we hear policy measures that are contrary to our values, banning certain classes of people because of who they are or what they look like, what faith they practice, then we have to be pretty hard about saying no to that,” he said. “I think that America will do that this time, as well.”
“So overall, I’m optimistic,” Obama said. “But, you know, I think we have to pay close attention to what’s going on.”
