Former President Barack Obama said this week that he “expected” President Trump to be a “one-term” president.
“I did not expect Donald Trump to be elected,” Obama told Spanish newspaper El Pais while promoting his newly released memoir A Promised Land. “What I did expect, though, was that if he was elected, it’d be one term. I was right about that.”
Obama had predicted that Trump “would never” be president during an appearance on a Jimmy Kimmel Live! segment in 2016.
Obama also lamented Trump’s contesting of the presidential election results, pointing out that he called Trump to congratulate him on election night in 2016 and attempted to ensure a peaceful transition.
“Peaceful transfer of power between parties is part of what makes a democracy work,” Obama said. “We didn’t delay for weeks on end pretending that it hadn’t happened.”
Obama also criticized Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic in the interview, claiming that he left a “playbook” behind for the president to follow.
“I arranged for all of my agencies and teams to prepare manuals for the transition,” Obama said. “One of those manuals was a playbook on how to deal with the possibility of a pandemic. It seems that they didn’t follow those guidelines that we provided.”
Former Obama official and President-elect Joe Biden’s new chief of staff, Ron Klain, did leave behind recommendations for handling the outbreak of a deadly disease, but he has also admitted that the administration did “every possible thing wrong” while handling the H1N1 swine flu outbreak.