President Obama says he could have beaten Trump — Trump says ‘NO WAY!’

By Michael Kranish

December 26, 2016 at 5:02 PM

President Obama said Republican strategy was to block his programs. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

President Obama said in an interview released Monday that he could have beaten Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump “if I had run again.” In his most pointed critique yet, Obama said Hillary Clinton's campaign acted too cautiously out of a mistaken belief that victory was all but certain.

“If you think you're winning, then you have a tendency, just like in sports, maybe to play it safer,” Obama said in the interview with former adviser and longtime friend David Axelrod, a CNN analyst, for his “The Axe Files” podcast. The president said Clinton “understandably . . . looked and said, well, given my opponent and the things he's saying and what he's doing, we should focus on that.”

Trump took exception to this critique, tweeting out later in the day that “President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say NO WAY! —  jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc.”

Obama stressed his admiration for Clinton and said she had been the victim of unfair attacks. But, as he has in other exit interviews, Obama insisted that her defeat was not a rejection of the eight years of his presidency. To the contrary, he argued that he had put together a winning coalition that stretched across the country but that the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign had failed to follow through on it.

“I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I — if I had run again and articulated it — I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” the president said.

“See, I think the issue was less that