Stephen A. Smith admitted on Thursday night that President Donald Trump’s comments about former President Barack Obama in their latest interview were “disrespectful.”
In an interview with Smith on Thursday, the president insisted he would “easily” beat Obama if the two were to hypothetically run against one another, slamming his predecessor as “overrated,” “a divider,” and polarizing.
“I didn’t think he was a good president,” Trump told Smith.
Smith told CNN’s Laura Coates later that day he “was shocked that he went that far.”
“I wasn’t shocked that he said he thinks he’d beat him, but I was shocked that he would be so dismissive and disrespectful of Barack Obama,” Smith said. “I certainly don’t think that would happen, to be quite honest with you.”
The sports journalist and occasional political commentator then criticized Trump for being “just dogged in his belief in himself, as always, but also in his disgust with liberals, and his mentality is that the Democratic Party is ruining the country.”
“And so his thought is, ‘Obama is on the left, and he would have to capitulate to those folks on the left. It wouldn’t be the other way around, and as a result, it would make it pretty easy for me to beat him because all I have to do is point to all the crazy things the crazy left is doing, and that’s all it would take,’” Smith argued.
The president’s disparaging words about Obama came shortly after his party’s devastating loss in the midterms earlier this month, as a number of his own endorsed candidates lost to Democrats. Several critics have even attributed the GOP’s loss to Trump’s sinking poll numbers caused by his war in Iran.
However, Smith argued that Trump “thought that that mentality could be relatable to all of the other candidates that he was supporting, going against folks on the left.”
“And obviously the American people showed them otherwise,” he added.