WaPo | President Obama used one of the last news conferences of his
presidency Friday to lament the country’s deep political divisions,
asserting that they make the United States vulnerable to foreign
manipulation, and to warn President-elect Donald Trump to be less
casual in his dealings with foreign leaders.
“My advice to him
has been that before he starts having a lot of interactions with foreign
governments other than the usual courtesy calls, that he should want to
have his full team in place,” Obama said. “. . . He should want his
team to be fully briefed on what’s gone on in the past and where the
potential pitfalls may be. You want to make sure you’re doing it in a
systematic, deliberate, intentional way.”
For the past five
weeks, Obama has tried to hide his disappointment about Trump’s win and
to remain publicly upbeat about the country and its institutions. On
Friday, the optimistic facade began to crack.
He worried that the
political discourse had been degraded to a point where “everything is
under suspicion, and everybody is corrupt, and everybody is doing things
for partisan reasons, and all of our institutions are, you know, full
of malevolent actors.”
