Dismissing Republican front-runner Donald Trump as a “great publicity-seeker”, President Barack Obama says he does not believe that the billionaire businessman will get to be the next President of the United States.
“He knows how to get attention. He is, you know, the classic reality TV character and, at this early stage, it’s not surprising that he’s gotten a lot of attention,” Obama told CBS’s “60 Minutes” programme, remarking, “I don’t think he’ll end up being President of the United States.”
Trump hit back on Monday morning, commenting, “I watched his (Obama’s) performance last night and I thought it was terrible…I thought it was sad, because everything’s negative. There’s nothing positive.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Obama called his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server “a mistake”, but denied it posed a national security problem.
He also defended his own policy on Syria and rejected the view that Russian President Vladimir Putin was challenging American leadership with his military intervention in aid of the Assad regime.
Questioned on the Trump phenomenon, Obama commented that Trump had tapped into something real in the Republican Party, marked by anti-immigrant sentiment in a large measure at a time when the party was still to figure out what it was for as opposed to what it was against. He said he would leave it to pundits to determine if Trump was running out of steam and would disappear from the race.
On Clinton’s email saga and its security implications, Obama said, “I don’t think it posed a national security problem. I think that it was a mistake that she has acknowledged.”
“As a general proposition, when we’re in these offices, we have to be more sensitive and stay as far away from the line as possible when it comes to how we handle information, how we handle our own personal data,” he said, while suggesting that “it’s been ginned-up” by the Republicans “because of politics”.
On Syria, Obama disagreed with suggestions that Putin was challenging American leadership by using fighter jets and missiles in Syria, retorting: “If you think that running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in, in order to prop up your only ally, is leadership, then we’ve got a different definition of leadership.”
Obama maintained that the US had been able to disrupt a number of ISIS operations, but admitted it could not change the dynamic inside Syria by finding a way to help the moderate opposition on the ground. He also acknowledged the failure of his $500 million mission to “train and equip” 5,000 fighters the battle against ISIS.