Barack Obama: The 2020 60 Minutes interview

on election night 2016 then president barack obama called donald trump at about three o'clock in the morning to congratulate him even though mr trump had lost the popular vote and took the electoral college by less than one percent in three states today president trump declines to accept the verdict of the voters despite losing by greater margins to president-elect joe biden mr obama hasn't spoken of the election standoff until today we spoke to the 44th president on the release of his new book a promised land a memoir of his early years and first term the story will continue in a moment what is your advice in this moment for president trump well a president is a public servant they are temporary occupants of the office by design and when your time is up then it is your job to put the country first and think beyond your own ego and your own interests and your own disappointments my advice to president trump is if you want at this late stage in the game to be remembered as somebody who put country first uh it's time for you to do the same thing in your view it is time for him to concede absolutely well i mean i think it was time for him to concede probably the day after the election or at the latest two days after the election when you look at the numbers objectively joe biden will have one handily there is no scenario in which any of those states would turn the other way and certainly not enough to reverse the outcome of the election more than the courtesy of a concession the trump white house is declining to free up the usual funds and facilities for the incoming administration president-elect biden is not receiving secret national security briefings as mr trump did when he was president-elect what in your estimation would our adversaries be thinking right now russia china about the fact that the transition is not moving forward well i i look i i think our adversaries have seen uh us weakened uh not just as a consequence this election but over the last several years uh we have these cleavages in the body politic that they're convinced they can exploit there's the old adage that partisan politics should uh stop at the water's edge right that when it comes to our foreign policy that it is the united states of america not the divided states of america we met the former president at a symbol of america's past divisions the smithsonian's national portrait gallery was a hospital in the civil war clara barton and walt whitman cared for patients in the building where the 16th president consoled his wounded we joined mr obama's peers in the gallery of the presidents to talk about his book i'm curious about the title i think a lot of people feel that we are farther from a promised land well i i titled it the promised land because even though we may not get there in our lifetimes even if we experience hardships and disappointments along the way that i at least still have faith we can create a more perfect union not a perfect union but a more perfect union you write in the book our democracy seems to be teetering on the brink of a crisis what do you mean we have gone through a presidency that disregarded a whole host of basic institutional norms expectations we have for a president that have been observed by republicans and democrats uh previously uh and maybe most importantly uh and and uh most disconcertingly what we've seen is what some people call truth decay something that's been accelerated by outgoing president trump the sense that not only do we not have to tell the truth but the truth doesn't even matter what are these false claims of widespread election fraud doing to our country right now the president doesn't like to lose and never admits loss i'm more troubled by the fact that other republican officials who clearly know better are going along with this are humoring him in this fashion it is one more step in delegitimizing not just the incoming biden administration but democracy generally and that's a dangerous path we would never accept that out of our own kids behaving that way if they lost right i i mean if if my daughters in any kind of competition uh pouted and and then accused the other side of uh cheating when they lost when there was no evidence of it we'd scold them you know i think that there has been uh this sense over the last several years that literally anything goes and is justified in order to get power uh and that's not unique to the united states there are strong men and dictators around the world who think that i can do anything to stay in power i can kill people i can throw them in jail i can run phony elections i can suppress journalists um but that's not who we're supposed to be and one of the signals i think that joe biden needs to send to the world is that no those values that we preached and we believed in and subscribed in we still believe president-elect biden won in this election more votes than anyone in history yeah and yet the 2020 vote wasn't a repudiation of donald trump it was more like an affirmation he received 71 million votes eight million more than he did in 2016. what does that tell you about our country today well a it tells us that we're very divided and as i said it's not just the politicians now the voters are divided it has now become a contest where issues facts policies per se don't matter as much as identity and wanting to uh beat the other guy you know that's taken priority i do think the current and media environment adds to that greatly this democracy doesn't work if we don't have an informed citizenry this democracy doesn't work if we don't have responsible elected officials at other levels who are willing to call the president when he's not doing something right call him on it it seems though mr president that americans have gone from disagreeing with one another to hating one another the problem that this man had uh you know and i wonder he's a he's a good example of uh of somebody who uh who i think understood deeply uh the need to to be able to see uh another person's point of view how do we overcome where we are today well there's no uh american figure that i admire uh any more than abraham lincoln but he did end up with a civil war on his hands i think we'd like to avoid that uh i i i i do think that uh a new president can set a new tone that's not going to solve all the gridlock in washington i think we're going to have to work with the media and with the tech companies to find ways to inform the public better about the issues and to bolster the the standards that ensure we can separate truth from fiction i think that we have to work at a local level when you start getting to the local level mayors county commissioners etc they've actually got to make real decisions it's not abstractions it's like we need to fix this road we need to uh get this snow plowed we need to make sure our kids uh have a safe playground to to play in and at that level i don't think people have that kind of visceral hatred and that's where we have to start in terms of rebuilding the social trust we need for democracy to work mr obama is speaking after four years of virtual silence on donald trump he followed a traditional commandment largely observed since adam succeeded washington thou shall not criticize your successor in a promised land he wonders if that was a mistake in your book you ask quote whether i was too tempered in speaking the truth too cautious in word or deed many americans mr president believe you were too cautious too tempered yeah and and i think that's a legitimate and understandable uh criticism at the end of the day i consistently tried to treat my political opposition uh in the ways i'd want to be treated to not overreact when for example somebody yells you lie in the middle of me giving a joint congressional address it's not true i understand why there were times where my supporters wanted me to be more pugilistic to you know uh pop folks uh in the head and and and duke it out a little bit more was it a mistake that you didn't every president brings a certain temperament to office i think part of the reason i got elected was because i sent a message that fundamentally i believe the american people are good and decent and that politics doesn't have to be uh some cage match in which uh everybody is is going at each other's throats uh and that we can agree without being disagreeable there have been worse presidential transitions than 2020 the southern states seceded while lincoln was president-elect still we couldn't help but notice outside the national portrait gallery businesses are still boarded up against the fear of political violence what should president trump do on this next inauguration day look there is there are a set of traditions that we have followed in the peaceful transfer of power the outgoing president congratulates the incoming president instructs the government and the agencies to cooperate with the new government coming in you invite the president-elect to the oval office how are you and then on inauguration day the president invites the president-elect to the white house there's a small reception and then you drive to the inauguration site and the outgoing president sits there is part of the audience as the new president is sworn in and at that point the outgoing president is a citizen like everybody else and owes the new president the chance to do their best on behalf of the american people whether donald trump will do the same thing we'll have to see so far that's not been his approach [Music] but you know hope spring's eternal there's a promised land out there somewhere two hours after mr obama said that president trump tweeted from the white house we will win even though no state is reporting fraud or errors that could change the outcome we'll be back with barack obama on other crises in our country and one in his own home during barack obama's first inauguration in 2009 unknown to the public there was intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned president obama had at the podium instructions he would read to the crowd should there be an evacuation of nearly two million people from the national mall this is one of the insights in mr obama's new book a promised land a memoir of his early years his historic election and his first term we spoke to the 44th president about battles past and present the story will continue in a moment did you watch the video of george floyd's strangulation of course it was heartbreaking um very rarely though did you see it so viscerally and over a stretch of time where the humanity of the victim is so apparent the pain and the the vulnerability of someone uh so clear and it was i think a moment in which america for a brief moment came face to face with a reality that african americans in this country i think had understood for quite some time and i was heartened and and uh inspired by the the galvanizing effect that it had on the country as a whole the fact that it wasn't just black people it wasn't just so quote unquote liberals who were appalled by it reacted to it and eventually marched but it was everybody and it was a small first step in the kind of reckoning with our past and our present that so often uh we avoid but mr president trayvon martin yeah tamir rice briona taylor right george floyd right why is this injustice never overcome well for a couple of reasons one is that we have a criminal justice system in which we ask oftentimes very young oftentimes not very well trained officers to go into communities and just keep a lid on things and you know we don't try to get at some of the underlying causes for chronic poverty so if we're going to actually solve this problem there are some specific things we can do to make sure that our contracts with police officers don't completely insulate them when they do something wrong putting money into budgets for training these police officers more effectively teaching police officers not to escalate but to de-escalate but it's important for us not to let ourselves off the hook and think this is just a police problem because those shootings that devaluation of life is part and parcel with a legacy of discrimination and jim crow and segregation that we're all responsible for and if we're going to actually put an end to racial bias in the criminal justice system then we're going to have to work on doing something about racial bias in corporate america and bias in where people can buy homes and and that is a larger project in which all of the good news is all of us can take some responsibility we can all do better on this front than we've been doing scott how are you elbow bump i'm well mr president we joined the president this past wednesday behind masks and then kept our distance as the u.s counted 143 thousand known covet infections that day a new record mr obama had also faced an outbreak in his first term a new flu h1n1 i was terrified of it and very quickly mobilized a team to figure out how are we going to take the best possible approach and from the start i had some very clear criteria which was number one we're going to follow the science and the second thing was let's make sure we're providing good information the american people but h1n1 was not as contagious nor as lethal as cobit it ultimately killed 12 000 americans other battles in his book include the financial crisis passing the affordable care act the decision to kill osama bin laden and leaving eight years of work in the hands of another you begin the book by writing about the day that you left washington quote to someone diametrically opposed to everything we stood for that may be the one thing that donald trump and i agree on is that he doesn't agree with me on anything i don't see him as the cause for our divisions and the problems with our government i think he's an accelerant but they preceded him and sadly are going to likely outlast him you write in the book that republicans had a battle plan to quote refuse to work with me regardless of the circumstances the issue or the consequences for the country now the same might be said of democrats in a republican administration yeah i wonder if today you think that democrats and republicans are no longer capable of compromise first of all i don't think this is just a plague on both their houses here so the democrats opposed george bush on a whole bunch of stuff but ted kennedy worked with george bush to pass a prescription drug plan for seniors nancy pelosi who adamantly opposed the war in iraq time and again voted even when her base was angry about it to make sure that our troops were funded once the decision to send in troops to iraq went in mr obama blames gridlock on something old and something new the senate's filibuster tradition which allows whatever party is in the minority to block legislation and non-traditional media the media landscape has changed and as a consequence voters perceptions have changed so that i think democratic and republican voters have become much more partisan i would often hear this from republicans during my presidency some of these folks had been colleagues of mine i served in the senate some of them were friends of mine and they would confess to me i said look mr president i know you're right but if i vote with you on this i'm going to get killed i'll lose my seat because what had happened is their voter base had soaked in so much information that was demonizing me demonizing the affordable care act that it becomes very difficult even for folks who want to cooperate to cooperate and that's why uh i am somebody who does not blame the current partisanship solely on donald trump or solely on social media you already saw some of these trends taking place early in my presidency but i do think they've kept on getting worse the former president also writes about his unlikely rise including the obstacles at home you're surprisingly honest in the book about your wife's opposition to you running for president in 2008 you quote her as saying the answer is no i do not want you running for president god barack when is it going to be enough did i get the tone right yeah it was a little sharper than that but it was pretty good and then she walks out of the room why did that not stop you look it's a legitimate question keep in mind the context here we had just two years earlier i'd run for the u.s senate in an unlikely race two years before that i had run for congress in a race you lost and a race i lost a couple of years before that i'd run for the state senate we've got two young kids michelle's still working and i ask myself in the book you know how much of this is just megalomania how much of this is vanity how much of this is me trying to prove something to myself and over time she made a conclusion that i shouldn't stand in the way of this um she did she should not stand in the way of your ambitions to be president yeah and and and she did so grudgingly um and the fact that i ended up winning didn't necessarily alleviate her her frustration because the toll it takes on families is real i think it's only after you emerge from an all-consuming job that you realize that everything you hold dear is thanks to the one you love i think i actually realized that even while i was in the job the fact that she put up with it and forgave me was uh an act of of grace that i am grateful for and i'm not sure i deserved it the goal here scott today at age 59 mr obama is working on his presidential center so this is going to be on the south side of chicago in historic jackson park and it's it's the place where michelle and i met where i first started in public life his team brought this model to show us mr obama's foundation has raised from private donations a little over half the estimated 500 million dollar cost it'll take about four years once they start it's going to be a place where you know we have the standard model oval office and michelle's dresses which will be very popular no doubt but also you know a whole host of facilities that allow us to provide classroom training to young people who are interested in public service and you know to beautify a park that can serve a whole bunch of young people who've been underserved in the past in his last moments in the oval office mr obama left a note in the president's desk for his successor it read in part we are just temporary occupants of this office it's up to us to leave the instruments of our democracy at least as strong as we found them on that last day the emotions really focus on the team that you've been working on and it's very rare outside of maybe war time where you get a collection of people working together in a sustained way under that kind of pressure and stress and so there's a melancholy to it there was also though and i write about this a satisfaction in knowing that i had finished the job i had run my stretch of the race and i could say unequivocally despite regrets and disappointments about some things not getting done the country was better off when i left than when i when i got there producer maria gavrilovich uncovering barack obama since 2007 at 60minutesovertime.com

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 6,792,204

Keywords: 60 Minutes, CBS News, 2020 United States Presidential Election, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Joe Biden

Id: mAFv55o47ok

Length: 27min 2sec (1622 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2020

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