Obama: Trump is the 'classic reality TV character'

published 12 October 2015

President Obama discussed both current and potential presidential candidates during an interview on 60 Minutes that aired Sunday.

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, Obama said, is a "great publicity-seeker, and at a time when the Republican Party hasn't really figured out what it's for as opposed to what it's against." Trump's comments on deporting undocumented immigrants and building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico touch something that "exists in the Republican Party that's real," Obama said. But while "I think there is genuine anti-immigrant sentiment in the large portion of at least Republican primary voters, I don't think it's uniform." The billionaire and former star of The Apprentice is "the classic reality TV character," the president added, and while he'll leave it "up to the pundits" to determine if Trump will stay in the race, he does have one prediction: "I don't think he'll end up being president of the United States."

Obama said that he did not know Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used a private email server while secretary of state, and it was not a threat to national security. "She made a mistake," he said. "She has acknowledged it. I do think that the way it's been ginned up is in part because of politics. And I think she'd be the first to acknowledge that maybe she could have handled the original decision better and the disclosures more quickly." Vice President Joe Biden, who has yet to announce if he will enter the race, is one of the finest vice presidents ever, Obama said, and it's not hard for him to see why he'd want to try for a promotion: "If you're sitting right next to the president in every meeting and... wrestling with these issues, I'm sure that for him he's saying to himself, 'I could do a really good job.'" Catherine Garcia

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.