President-elect Donald Trump is tweeting his vehement disagreement with President Barack Obama's recent statement that he could have defeated the Republican nominee in 2016.
President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say NO WAY! - jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2016
The president-elect is referring to a comment that Obama made to David Axelrod, his former campaign strategist and senior adviser, during a podcast released Monday night.
"You know, I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I — if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it," President Obama said. "I know that in conversations that I've had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would say the vision, the direction that you point towards is the right one."
Obama's interview with Axelrod also contained interesting insights into why he believed this year's Democratic nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wound up losing the election.
"If you think you're winning, then you have a tendency, just like in sports, maybe to play it safer," President Obama said. "And the economy has been improving. There is a sense, obviously, that some communities have been left behind from the recovery and people feeling anxious about that. But if she was looking at the campaign and saying, OK, I'm winning right now, and her economic agenda was in fact very progressive."
The president also made it clear that he felt Clinton had handled herself very well in an incredibly difficult situation.
"I think that Hillary Clinton performed wonderfully under really tough circumstances," President Obama said. "I've said this publicly, I'll repeat it. I think there was a double standard with her. For whatever reason, there's been a longstanding difficulty in her relationship with the press that meant her flaws were wildly amplified."
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