President Barack Obama bluntly predicted on Tuesday that a Democrat will succeed him after the 2016 presidential race.
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“I think it’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, or perhaps most naïve”, Trump said.
“What you realize is American leadership involves not just playing to a narrow constituency back home, but you now are in fact at the center of what happens around the world”, Obama further claimed. Yet speaking from Paris on Tuesday, Obama said, “You know, just with respect to my successor, let me first of all say that I’m anticipating a Democrat succeeding me”.
And Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., said he wished Obama took the threat posed by “radical Jihadists” such as the Islamic State as seriously as he takes what Duncan called a “pseudoscientific threat” posed by climate change.
But Republicans may be feeling more confident of facing down Obama after the president reluctantly signed a defense spending measure last week that blocked his efforts to close Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. “Based on my discussions with President [Francois] Hollande and other leaders, I am confident that we can continue building momentum and adding resources to our efforts to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL, to disrupt plots against America and our allies and to bring about the political resolution necessary to resolve the situation in Syria and relieve the hardships on the Syrian people”.
The latest polls lend some credence to Obama’s prediction.
“The reason is because this one trend, climate change, affects all trends”, he explained.
With the summit getting under way in the wake of the devastating terror attacks in the same city, some Republicans have questioned whether Obama is focusing too much on global warming and not enough on security.
Many conservatives in the US Congress deny that climate change is a result of human industry and agriculture, and have opposed emissions controls created to slow global warming. Obama said. The president said that, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter (after China), “we embrace our responsibility to do something about it”.
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At almost the same time Monday, Obama was telling world leaders that meeting to reach a global deal on fighting climate change would be beneficial to the fight against terrorism. “And I would note that the American people, I think in the most recent survey, two-thirds of them said America should be a signatory to any agreement that emerges that is actually addressing climate change in a serious way”.
