If you were hoping to see Barack Obama return to the White House, you would be disappointed. A return to the White House is not in the cards for the former president.
The former president spoke with CBS Sunday Morning’s Gayle King in a new interview and told her that he would help his former vice president in any way he can, but not in any official capacity as a cabinet member.
“He doesn’t need my advice. I will help him in any way that I can,” Obama told King. “I’m not planning to suddenly work on the White House staff or something.”
He then joked, “There are probably some things I would not be doing, ’cause Michelle would leave me. She’d be like, ‘What? You’re doin’ what?'”
Obama, who has been kept a reasonably low profile since leaving the White House, talked about the comments he made regarding Donald Trump last month while campaigning for Biden.
“It wasn’t personal,” Obama told King of his remarks against Trump. “The truth is everything I said; I was just stating facts.”
“It is not my preference to be out there,” he added. “I think we were in a circumstance in this election in which certain norms, certain institutional values that are so extraordinarily important, had been breached – that it was important for me, as somebody who had served in that office, to simply let people know, ‘This is not normal.'”
Obama made it clear that he has confidence in the outcome of the election and that Joe Biden will be president, contrary to what Trump thinks about the results.
“Well, look, Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States; Kamala Harris will be the next vice president,” he said. “There is no legal basis, there’s no factual scenarios in which …”
Trump has refused to concede and continues to make false claims about the election results. He alleges widespread voter fraud and that the Democrats “stole the election,” filing legal challenge after legal challenge in several states.
He also expressed his disappointment in the members of the Republican Party that continue to support Trump’s egregious claims surrounding the election results.
“And that has been disappointing,” Obama said. “But it’s been sort of par for the course during these four years. They obviously didn’t think there was any fraud going on, ’cause they didn’t say anything for the first two days.”
“What it says is that we are still deeply divided,” he said when asked about the 70 million voters who cast their ballot for Trump.
“The power of that alternative worldview that’s presented in the media that those voters consume, it carries a lot of weight.”
