Donald Trump’s budding bromance with President Obama flowered anew on Wednesday when the president-elect gushed about his once bitter rival on national TV — and said he’s soliciting his advice about potential appointments.
“We have a really good chemistry together. I really like him as a person,” Trump said on NBC’s “Today” show. “I love getting his ideas.”
The billionaire businessman — who lambasted Obama as “a loser” and worse on the campaign trail — said they even talked about possible appointments to Team Trump.
“I take his recommendations very seriously. There are some people I will be appointing and I have appointed that he thought very highly of,” Trump said, without revealing which jobs were involved.
“I have asked him what he would think of this one and that one. We have a very good dialogue.”
Trump said he was taking the high road because America needs to come together.
His remarks were a marked turn from his harsh rhetoric during the hard-fought campaign against Hillary Clinton and, by extension, Obama.
“He has done such a lousy job as president,” Trump bellowed during a speech in South Carolina in February.
“You look at our budgets, you look at our spending, we can’t beat ISIS, Obamacare is terrible. And you look at everything, our borders are like Swiss cheese, this man has done such a bad job, he has set us back so far.”
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the relationship would make good fodder for an afternoon TV show.
‘This would probably make for an interesting episode of Dr. Phil.’
- White House spokesman Josh Earnest
“This would probably make for an interesting episode of Dr. Phil,” he said. “Not that I’m giving them any programming ideas, but they can take that one and run with it.”
Analysts said Trump could have many reasons for playing up the relationship.
“We don’t know what’s really going on. For Obama I feel is he doing what in his mind is his civic duty to try to guide this president-elect. Obama also serves a strategic purpose, giving Trump some legitimacy and allowing him to argue to the media that he is reaching out across the partisan aisle,” Princeton University Prof. Julian Zelizer told The Post.
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said it’s good for the country.
“Maybe they are both just making nice the way they are supposed to do during the transition. Even if they are pretending, it’s a good thing, since the country is so divided,” he said.
“Imagine if Trump and Obama were feuding. The situation would be so much worse.”
Seton Hall political science Prof. Matt Hale added, “President Obama is the most popular politician in America, so it makes some good politics from Trump to do some serious sucking up.”
Trump in an interview with Time magazine published Wednesday also said he would “work something out” on his campaign proposal to deport so-called “Dreamers,” children of illegal immigrants brought to the US at a young age who were allowed to stay by the Obama Administration.
“We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud. They got brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. And they’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Trump about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.