This is what Obama wanted his daughters to know after Hillary Clinton lost the election

(Image credit: Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images)

published 18 November 2016

President Barack Obama has done a lot of comforting and reassuring since Donald Trump won the presidential election last week. One White House source told The New Yorker that when meeting with staffers the day after the election, Obama and his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, were "almost like grief counselors."

But there was perhaps an even tougher conversation Obama needed to have: the one with his daughters, Malia and Sasha. Obama revealed what he wanted them to know in an interview with The New Yorker:

"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, okay, where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward." [The New Yorker]

Obama himself admitted, though, that he doesn't "believe in apocalyptic — until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world." Read more about how he is feeling in the face of an impending Trump presidency at The New Yorker.

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.