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Former President Barack Obama isn’t surprised that President Donald Trump has refused to concede the presidential race after Joe Biden was named the winner by the Associated Press and other major U.S. news organizations over the past week. But he is disappointed that so many Republicans have backed Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud.
“The president doesn’t like to lose and never admits loss,” Obama tells “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley in an interview that will air this Sunday. “CBS Evening News” previewed a clip of the upcoming segment on Thursday.
“I’m more troubled by the fact that other Republican officials who clearly know better are going along with this, are humoring him in this fashion,” Obama continues. “It is one more step in delegitimizing not just the incoming Biden administration, but democracy generally. And that’s a dangerous path.”
Obama also taped an interview with Gayle King that will air on “CBS Sunday Morning” this weekend. Both segments are his first televised interviews since the 2020 election, and also come ahead of his new memoir “A Promised Land” that will hit shelves on Tuesday.
He tells King that presidents are “not above the rules. We’re not above the law, that’s the essence of our democracy.”
And he recalls that when Trump won the 2016 election, during Obama’s second and final term, that “I stayed up until 2:30 in the morning, and I then called Donald Trump to congratulate him.”
And that was a tight race too. “His margin of victory over Hillary Clinton wasn’t greater than Joe Biden’s margin over him,” Obama says.
Here’s another clip of Obama’s upcoming “60 Minutes” interview, where he discusses the resiliency of the American people.
President Trump appeared on “60 Minutes” just before the election, but his interview was marked by some controversy after the commander-in-chief abruptly cut the interview with veteran TV journalist Leslie Stahl short. Trump then attempted to discredit Stahl on Twitter by sharing a video clip of her not wearing a mask and accusing her of asking biased questions. He then violated his agreement with CBS News by releasing the White House’s recording of an interview three days before it was supposed to air on CBS.
Read:Seth Meyers calls Trump’s leaked ‘60 Minutes’ interview ‘embarrassing’ and ‘cringe-inducing’
But the program, which featured interviews with Biden, Kamala Harris, Mike Pence and Trump, still drew its biggest audience in more than two years.
