“It's not my intention to be the old man at the bar who's just kind of hanging on. But I don't anticipate that I'll suddenly vanish,” President Obama said yesterday during a 20-minute TV interview with Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show.
Normally, it’s an unspoken rule that former US Presidents do not openly criticise their successor in public. But two-term President Obama says he won’t be afraid to raise his voice if there was any type of attack on the rights of Muslim Americans that would “violate the Constitution” and that he would be keeping an eagle eye on Trump’s controversial deportation plans.
President Obama said he would not stand idly by if, in the hypothetical situation, any Dream Act beneficiaries – which are young people who immigrated to the US as children – are “rounded up” for deportation.
He pointed out that such a controversial scenario – if it did happen – would be “contrary to who we are as a nation of laws and of immigrants”.
Obama said that he warned Trump – whom he doesn’t see eye-to-eye on many issues, such as climate change, immigration, and health care, to name just a few – not to make an rash decisions or ignore problems.
“I said to [Trump], ‘You can find different approaches to deal with problems. What you can't do is pretend they're not problems,’” President Obama said.
President Obama also added that he wouldn’t be surprised if Donald Trump does a volte-face on any of his pre-election promises.
"The president-elect may say one thing and do another once he is here because the truth of the thing is, it's a big complicated world, it doesn't matter how smart you are, you have to have the best possible information to make the best decision possible," he stated.