Former President Barack Obama said in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) that President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede even before the official elections results have been certified is “hurting the American people.”
In the interview aired on various NPR programs, host Michel Martin claimed that not only is Trump not conceding, but he is interfering with the transition from a Trump administration to a Biden administration.
“I want to talk more about that at the end of our conversation, but as we are speaking now, President Trump is refusing to concede, and he’s refusing to even to cooperate with the transition,” Martin said. “How do you understand that? What do you think that is? Some people are calling it a tantrum, other people take it a lot more seriously. How do you understand it?”
“I take it seriously,” Obama said. “I don’t think he’ll be successful in denying reality. And you’re starting to see a few Republican elected officials go ahead and say, ‘Look, Joe Biden has been elected and we need to move on in the transition.’”
“I’m distressed that you haven’t seen more Republican leadership make this clear because the amount of time that’s being lost of in this transition process has real-world effects,” Obama said. “Look, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. We’re in the middle of an economic crisis. We have serious national security issues.”
Obama praised George W. Bush’s “gracious and effective” transition before trashing Trump.
“And since we were in the middle of a big financial crisis, at that point my ability to get fully briefed from a Hank Paulson, my abilities — since we were in the middle of two wars — to get immediately briefed on what was happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, what terrorist threats were out there that meant we hit the ground running and allowed us to be more effective in our responses,” Obama said. “And so, it is yet one more example of how Donald Trump’s breach of basic democratic norms is hurting the American people.”
Follow Penny Starr on Twitter
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.