Obama accuses Trump of ‘exploiting’ fears of working-class men

President Barack Obama has slammed Donald Trump for exploiting the fear of working-class men who have had trouble adjusting to recent economic and demographic changes, saying that the GOP frontrunner is exploiting their “anger, frustration, fear.”

The president said “blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck.”

“You combine those things, and it means that there is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear — some of it justified, but just misdirected,” Obama added. “I think somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that. That's what he's exploiting during the course of his campaign.”

In the interview with NPR, Obama also suggested that some of the opprobrium directed to him personally may be rooted in the fact that he is the first black U.S. president.

He said that there would always be “folks who are frustrated” about the polices of a president, but that specific strains in the Republican Party suggest “somehow I'm different, I'm Muslim, I'm disloyal to the country, etc — which unfortunately is pretty far out there.” Such views may gain traction “because of my unique demographic,” the president said.

Obama added: “What I'd say there is that that's probably pretty specific to me and who I am and my background, and that in some ways I may represent change that worries them.”

He also used the interview to defend his administration's handling of the scourge of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), saying that he is open to some “legitimate criticism” for failing to adequately explain his strategy to counter ISIL. But he chided Republican presidential candidates for criticizing his policy without offering an alternative. 

Obama noted that the United States has carried out 9,000 strikes against the group and taken back towns including Sinjar, Iraq. 

“When you ask them, ‘well, what would you do instead?’ they don't have an answer,” Obama said of Republican candidates he has observed in televised debates. 

The interview is one of many recent attempts by the president to ease Americans' fears following the Paris attacks and the shootings by a Muslim couple in San Bernardino, California, on Dec. 2 that killed 14 people.

A national survey by the Pew Research Center found 37 percent of respondents approve of the way Obama is handling terrorism, while 57 percent disapprove, the lowest rating he has received on the issue. 

Obama attributed these low approval ratings for how he has handled terrorism to the saturation of ISIL attacks in the media after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris that killed 130 people.

In his year-end news conference before leaving for a two-week vacation in Hawaii last week, Obama urged Americans to stay vigilant against homegrown threats while not allowing themselves to become terrorized or divided.

“Now on our side, I think that there is a legitimate criticism of what I've been doing and our administration has been doing in the sense that we haven't ... on a regular basis ... described all the work that we've been doing for more than a year now to defeat ISIL,” he said.

Asked if he would consider instating a no-fly zone in Syria, as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has suggested, Obama said such a move would not serve to counter ISIL since the group does not have an air force. 

Al Jazeera and Reuters