President Obama no longer thinks that all the “progress” he’s made in his eight years at the White House will be dissolved once the next administration begins, but he is urging Republicans not to try dismantling his accomplishments simply because they were his projects.
During the election season, when he campaigned for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Obama said, “all the progress we’ve made goes out the window if we don’t win.” Clinton lost the Nov. 8 election to Donald Trump.
Asked if he still believes that during an interview that aired Sunday on ABC News’ “This Week,” Obama changed his tune.
“I think that the risk to all the progress we’ve made was at stake in the election because not just the president-elect but a lot of members of Congress, including now the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader, have said that their principal agenda was to undo a lot of this progress,” Obama said.
One of the first things Republicans plan to do, now that they won control both Congress and the White House, is to settle on a way to repeal and replace Obama’s signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. But Obama doesn’t see all the “gains” made under the healthcare law going away.
“I think Republicans now are recognizing that’s — may not be what the American people, including even Trump voters, are looking for,” he told host George Stephanopoulos.
Though he admitted Republicans “theoretically” have the power to undue Obamacare, Obama said that would mean “suddenly 20 million people or more don’t have health insurance.”
“Don’t undo things just because I did them,” Obama said. “I don’t have pride of authorship,” he added.
“If in fact the Republicans make some modifications, some of which I may have been seeking previously, but they wouldn’t cooperate because they didn’t wanna — make the system work, and re-label it as ‘Trumpcare,’ I’m fine with that,” Obama said.
