Barack Obama Roasts Donald Trump Over Election

In an interview that ran nearly a half hour, Barack Obama spoke candidly and often hilariously about his time in the White House, the power structure in his family, his former Vice President’s big win and Donald Trump’s — reaction so far.

The former president was dropping jokes almost as smoothly as he dropped that basketball in the hoop — “That’s what I do” — with a few aimed directly at his former residence and the man who currently calls it home.

Of course, Jimmy Kimmel was more than happy to set him up to deliver great off-the-cuff punchlines, like when he asked Obama if his new book, “A Promised Land,” was 700 pages so that President Trump wouldn’t read it.

“I don’t think it would have had to be 700 to make sure he didn’t read it, from what I hear,” quipped Obama.

He joked that his daughters Malia and Sasha also have no interest in reading it, sharing that it took them a decade to read his last book. So he expects they’ll have read it perhaps by the time they’re 30.

Obama also confirmed the rumor Kimmel had heard that he’s afraid of his daughter Sasha, but we quickly learned that it’s with good reason.

“The reason is because Sasha is a mini-Michelle, and I’m afraid of Michelle,” Obama said with a smile. “And Sasha, having seen that, basically has the same look, the same attitude.”

He said that daughter Malia has more of his temperament, as well as his facial structure. “We call ourselves the long faces,” he explained.

“The round faces are Michelle and Sasha and the round faces are a fiercer tribe,” he continued. “We’re like the vegetarians, the gatherers and they’re the hunters. We try to keep the peace with them.”

The humor runs through the family, as he took viewers behind-the-scenes of his disastrous attempt to go to the zoo with his daughters while president only to learn that the leader of the free world is pretty recognizable.

His daughters brilliantly put together a plan involving him using the alias Johnny McJohnjohn and speaking in a higher pitch and much faster than he normally does. But when they shared it with Michelle after getting home, she saw just one major flaw in it.

“The only way Daddy is going to disguise himself is if he has surgery to pin back his ears,” Michelle said, according to her husband, who added, “Which I found somewhat offensive.”

But while his family was able to keep him on his toes, he was better at keeping a lot of the outside noise from distracting him, including the ridiculous birther theory, flamed to life in large party by Donald Trump, while he was putting together the campaign to take out Osama Bin Laden.

“It gives you kind of an example of the weirdness of modern politics where you want the president to be focused on the job, not on a circus,” he said. “But the circus is what, a lot of times, is dominating the press and ends up distracting a lot of the White House.”

“One of the things I always had to do was try to screen that stuff out to make sure that I’m keeping my eye on the ball,” he continued.

That’s something the current president is perhaps less successful at, with Obama pointing out that a nutty conspiracy theory can be ridiculous and dismissible, until the president is retweeting it.

With Trump the topic, Kimmel had to ask if there were any concerns about what might happen if Trump simply refused to leave the White House in time for Joe Biden to take over on January 20.

“I think we can always send the Navy Seals in there to dig him out,” Obama said with a chuckle.

He very eloquently and politely dug into the president’s refusal to accept the results of the election by asserting that he didn’t feel premature at all in congratulating Biden before Trump conceded.

“There seems to be some lag,” he said. “The communication system in the White House used to be better. It was real time. There’s a lot of computers there that actually tell you what’s going on around the world.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Obama talked about the proudest accomplishment of his presidency, the Affordable Care Act, while still calling it just a first step that he acknowledges is in need of continued tweaking (something he says Biden is also making a priority).

And finally, in a breathlessly adorable exchange, Obama surprises a super-fan of his with a virtual book reading she thinks is pre-recorded, until he starts talking directly to her. Her response is absolutely priceless!

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