President Obama Talks About Donald Trump’s Presidency With The New Yorker’s David Remnick

"This is not the apocalypse," President Obama says near the beginning of an exhaustive interview with The New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick.

President Obama had some enlightening things to say about the political ascent of Donald J. Trump, and how his administration is dealing with the unexpected outcome of the election. When Remnick asks him to elaborate on the statement, Obama explains: “I don’t believe in apocalyptic — until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.”

Still, the story offers insight into Obama's opinion of Trump, and makes the case of how the GOP used the issue of inequality and anxiety to get Trump elected. "The Republicans don’t care about that issue,” Obama said. “There’s no pretense that anything that they’re putting forward, any congressional proposals that are going to come forward, will reduce inequality." Remnick's feature explores key moments over the past week since Trump was elected, going past what the pundits have been saying on the news. Here are some of the highlights:

On Obama's meeting with president-elect Trump:

The official line at the White House was that the hour-and-a-half meeting with Trump went well and that Trump was solicitous. Later, when I asked Obama how things had really gone, he smiled thinly and said, “I think I can’t characterize it without . . . ” Then he stopped himself and said that he would tell me, “at some point over a beer—off the record.”

(Maybe that's why the Obamas cancelled their photo op with the Trumps?)

On how the outgoing team is enjoying the transition:

I asked McDonough how it was going, and he gave me a death-skull grin. “Everything’s great!” he said. He clenched his teeth and grinned harder in self-mockery. McDonough is the picture of rectitude: the ramrod posture, the trimmed white hair, the ashen mien of a bishop who has missed two meals in a row. “I guess if you keep repeating it, it’s like a mantra, and it will be O.K. ‘Everything will be O.K., everything will be O.K.’ ”

On what Obama tells Malia and Sasha about the election:

“What I say to them is that people are complicated,” Obama told me. “Societies and cultures are really complicated. . . . This is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding. And you should anticipate that at any given moment there’s going to be flare-ups of bigotry that you may have to confront, or may be inside you and you have to vanquish. And it doesn’t stop. . . . You don’t get into a fetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say, O.K., where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward.”

Read the full feature at The New Yorker

Related: What Donald Trump and President Obama Talked About in Their Post-Election Meeting

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