In an interview with The Atlantic, Barack Obama said Donald Trump is a ‘Richie Rich’ type and far from the ideal of American masculinity.
The former president told the American magazine: “I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up: the John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter. There was a code.
“The code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the ‘30s and ‘40s and before that.”
Obama also said that he thought if a ‘right-wing populist’ would become a leader, it would be someone ‘more appealing’ than the current president.
“I’m not surprised that somebody like Trump could get traction in our political life. He’s a symptom as much as an accelerant,” he continued.
“But if we were going to have a right-wing populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.”
He continued: “There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully—in fact he defends the vulnerable against bullies.
“And so even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich—the complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure.”
Richie Rich, a comic character created in the 1950s, is the son of a billionaire and the world’s richest boy who could get anything he want. Young Richie was played by Rory Culkin in the 1994 American comedy film directed by Donald Petrie.
“I did not believe how easily the Republican establishment, people who had been in Washington for a long time and had professed a belief in certain institutional values and norms, would just cave’ to Trumpian populism,” Obama told The Atlantic.
“The power of Palin’s rallies compared with McCain’s rallies—just contrast the excitement you would see in the Republican base,” he added. “I think this hinted at the degree to which appeals around identity politics, around nativism, conspiracies, were gaining traction.”
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