Obama On Trump Cheering Brexit: He’s Hardly ‘Legitimate’ Spox For Populism (VIDEO)

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President Barack Obama warned that politicians like Donald Trump are falsely trying to frame the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union as proof that a wave of anti-immigrant, populist sentiment washing across the U.S. and Europe has triumphed.

“Mr. Trump embodies global elites and has taken full advantage of it his entire life,” Obama said in an interview with NPR published Tuesday. “So, he’s hardly a spokesperson—a legitimate spokesperson—for a populist surge of working class people on either side of the Atlantic.”

Arriving in Scotland last week to open his new golf course on the day of the Brexit vote, Trump was quick to applaud himself for predicting the result of the vote and compare it to his own support.

“They took their country back, just like we will take America back,” Trump wrote in a tweet.

He also blamed President Obama, who was openly opposed to the UK’s departure from the EU, for influencing the vote by speaking out against it in a joint appearance with Prime Minister David Cameron.

The president told NPR that the parallels between the U.S. and UK were not so clear. He compared the economic recovery and banking reforms undertaken in the United States since the 2008 housing crisis to the decade of austerity-fueled “stagnation” that has choked growth in Europe. Still, Obama allowed, Trump and pro-leave forces in the UK had the same goal: stoking anti-immigrant sentiment to distract from economic woes.

“Overall I think the differences are greater than the similarities. But what is absolutely true is that the ability to tap into a fear that people may have about losing control and to offer some sort of vague nostalgic feelings about how we’ll make Britain great again, we’ll make America great again,” Obama said. “And the subtext for that is somehow that a bunch of foreigners, funny-looking people are coming in here and changing the basic character of the nation. I think that some of that is out there both in Europe and in the United States.”

Watch a clip of Obama’s interview below.

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