President Obama pushed back against what he sees as rising nativism in America, fueled by GOP nominee Donald Trump, as he took questions from an audience of 400 young people from across Southeast Asia during a town hall in Laos on Wednesday.
When asked by a woman from Indonesia how all the different ethnic and racial groups in the U.S. coexist peacefully, Obama credited the Bill of Rights and warned against devolving into an us-versus-them or nationalistic mentality.
“If you are the United States, sometimes you can feel lazy and think, ‘you know, we’re so big, we don’t really have to know anything about other people,'” said Obama, who lived in Indonesia as a boy. “That’s part of what I’m trying to change.”
Walking the streets of any big American city reveals the United States’ diversity, he said. Americans can be “any color, any religion, with a heritage from countries all around the world; and that’s our great strength because … when people from different cultures interact, then you’re always learning something,” Obama said.
“So we have to fight against” that urge to look inward and distrust anyone from a different group, Obama said.
“And that means that we have to be able to promote principles that rise above any individual religion, nationality, race,” he continued. “And that’s what we’ve been trying to promote — not always successfully — [and] not everybody in America agrees with me on this, by the way,” Obama said. “I’ll leave it at that.”
