Barack Obama reveals how he explained Donald Trump's win to his daughters

Outgoing President Barack Obama played a major role in campaigning to ensure voters supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. In fact he went as far as saying he would see it as a personal insult if voters didn’t turn out for Hillary. Addressing the Congressional Black Caucus gala he told the audience "I will consider it a personal insult -- an insult to my legacy -- if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good sendoff? Go vote."

So it’s safe to say that he, like so many of us, was bewildered and dismayed by Donald Trump’s win. And now he has opened up to the New Yorker about what he told his teenage daughters, Malia, 18, and Sasha, 15, on the morning of the election result. 

“What I say to them is that people are complicated,” he told the New Yorker’s David Remnick.

“Societies and cultures are really complicated. … This is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it’s messy.”

He continued “your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding.

“And you should anticipate that at any given moment there’s going to be flare-ups of bigotry that you may have to confront, or may be inside you and you have to vanquish.”

Finally he encouraged his daughters to continue to be hopeful, to have faith in humans “You don’t get into a fetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say, O.K., where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward?”

The relationship between Donald Trump and Barack Obama was openly a hostile one with Trump continually alleging that Obama was born in Kenya and, therefore, could not be president (American presidents have to be born in a U.S. state).

Obama has been a vocal critic of millionaire Trump’s racist and sexist language and didn’t hold back when expressing his fears over a Trump presidency: “One of the most disturbing things about this election is just the unbelievable rhetoric coming from the top of the Republican ticket,” he said. He added that Trump’s language “tells you he's insecure enough that he pumps himself up by putting others down – not a character trait that I would advise in the Oval Office.” 

The pair met at the White House last week and, in a public statement, Obama said that the pair had had “an excellent conversation” and stressed that he would do his best to make sure that Trump’s presidency was “successful”.