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Trump Explains His Viral Interaction with Obama at Jimmy Carter's Funeral

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It was a meeting Thursday of the world’s most exclusive club, and it had the political world buzzing.

At the funeral for former President Jimmy Carter, the country’s president and former presidents gathered at Washington’s National Cathedral, and more than a few observers were shocked at the apparent friendliness between outspoken political opponents former President Barack Obama and former and future President Donald Trump.

At a new conference afterward, Trump offered a simple explanation.



“What were you talking to Barack Obama about?” Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked.

Trump took the question with good humor.

“It did look very friendly, I must say,” he said.

“I didn’t realize how friendly it looked. I saw it on your wonderful network, just a little while ago before I came in, and I said, ‘Boy, they look like two people that like each other.’

Are you excited for Trump to take office?

“And we probably do.”

“We have a little different philosophies, ” he continued. “I don’t know, we just got along.”

In other words, despite their deep and irreconcilable political differences, they’re adults who can set aside disputes to pay their respects to a colleague and the office they all held in common — and do it with civility and humor. (That might surprise some progressives who actually believed the Democratic campaign line about Trump being the resurgence of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.)

Still, the interaction went viral on social media:

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And of course, some users had fun with it.

In his comments, Trump appeared to indicate that his very public chumminess with his predecessor in the White House wasn’t the only warmth at the funeral. The public didn’t see the rest, he implied.

“But I got along with just about everybody on that,” he said. “You know, we met backstage before we went on, and I thought it was a beautiful service, but we all got along very well.”

If so, that wasn’t evident from the apparent coolness of Trump’s other interactions — former President George W. Bush — no fan of Trump by any means — bypassed the president-elect completely while patting Obama in the stomach.

But it should be noted that Obama had stood as Bush approached with his wife, Laura Bush, on the way to their seats. Trump had remained seated.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American




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