Former Democratic operative turned journalist George Stephanopoulos on Thursday and Friday threw softballs at Barack Obama, setting the President up to attack certain Americans as bigots and to trash Ben Carson. On Thursday's Nightline, the journalist asked about Donald Trump’s immigration and deportation plans.
Stephanopoulos wondered, “So, what do you think when you hear people cheer for that?” Obama sneered, “I think is that there's always been a strain of anti-immigrant sentiment in America.” He added, “It's the job of leaders not to play into that sentiment. We don't want, I think, a president or any person in a position of leadership to play on those kinds of fears.” The journalist offered no push back to the pointed attack.
On Friday, Stephanopoulos followed a similar line of questioning, this time about Ben Carson:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So what do you think when you hear someone like Ben Carson get up and say, "Hey, this would be easy? We can take ISIL out just by bombing their oil fields." That's what a general told him.
BARACK OBAMA: What I think is that he doesn't know much about it.
On the subject of ISIS, the GMA co-host at least offered a little criticism, noting, “Even your friendly critics, Fareed Zakaria, says what you have on the ground now is not going to be enough. Every couple of months you will be faced with the same choice, back down or double down.”
Overall, however, the clips played on World News, Nightline and Good Morning America do not indicate a tough interview. (The entire discussion will air on Sunday’s This Week.)
In comparison, when Stephanopoulos, who donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation, talked to Marco Rubio on November 4, he grilled the senator on his finances, demanding, “Jeb Bush also in his campaign putting out the idea that you're a risky bet and raising questions that came up in your past campaigns about using the Republican Party credit card down in Florida for personal use.”
A transcript of the Thursday night segment is below:
Nightline
11/13/15
1:04am ETJUJU CHANG: With the race for the White House churning in the news cycle, President Obama sat down with our own George Stephanopoulos weighing in on a wide array of issues from the free speech controversy on college campuses to some Republican candidates' views on foreign policy and immigration.
BARACK OBAMA: The notion that we're going to deport 11 million, 12 million people from this country, first of all, I have no idea where Mr. Trump thinks the money's going to come from. It would cost us hundreds of billions of dollars to execute that. Imagine the images on the screen flashed around the world as we were dragging parents away from their children and putting them in, what, detention centers, and then systematically sending them out. Nobody thinks that that is realistic. But more importantly, that's not who we are as Americans.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So, what do you think when you hear people cheer for that?
OBAMA: Well, what I think is that there's always been a strain of anti-immigrant sentiment in America ironically from folks who themselves two generations back, or even one generation back, were immigrants themselves. And it's the job of leaders not to play into that sentiment. We don't want, I think, a president or any person in a position of leadership to play on those kinds of fears.
