Honolulu (CNN)President Barack Obama on Monday aired his most candid assessment to date about Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, charging in a radio interview the billionaire businessman was capitalizing on economic fears of white men to fuel his presidential campaign.
Offering his first explicit reaction to Trump since the candidate proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the country, Obama said such ideas are a blatant appeal to Americans' fears. Describing in general the reflexive opposition to his agenda from Republicans, Obama argued that some of that enmity was rooted in his position as the first African-American president.
"Blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck," he told National Public Radio in an interview taped before he departed for his winter vacation in Hawaii.
"There is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear. Some of it justified, but just misdirected. I think somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that," Obama said. "That's what he's exploiting during the course of his campaign."
Speaking more broadly -- and not explicitly about Trump -- Obama identified elements of Republican antagonism that he said could be fueled by ingrained resistance to an African-American commander in chief, citing "specific strains in the Republican Party that suggest that somehow I'm different, I'm Muslim, I'm disloyal to the country."
"In some ways, I may represent change that worries them," he said.
"I think if you are talking about the specific virulence of some of the opposition directed towards me, then, you know, that may be explained by the particulars of who I am," he added later.
The President acknowledged earlier in the sit-down interview that his administration may have fumbled its anti-ISIS communications strategy, but he insisted the plan itself was working and suggested saturated media coverage of the group could be fueling terror fears in the United States.
In the past few weeks, the White House has sought to step up its messaging efforts on counterterrorism, scheduling a prime-time television address and visits to the Pentagon and National Counterterrorism Center in an attempt to better explain progress made against the Islamic State group.
But Obama conceded those efforts, prompted by an ISIS-inspired attack that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, came after inadequate efforts to relay the work of a U.S.-led coalition in combating ISIS.
"We haven't on a regular basis, I think, described all the work that we've been doing for more than a year now to defeat ISIL," Obama told NPR. He called the communications blunder a "legitimate criticism of what I've been doing and our administration has been doing."
But he also pinned Americans' renewed unease about terror attacks on U.S. soil to blanket media coverage of ISIS attacks. The November ISIS terrorist massacre in Paris, which left 130 people dead, led to "a saturation of news about the horrible attack there," Obama said in the interview.
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"If you've been watching television for the last month, all you have been seeing, all you have been hearing about is these guys with masks or black flags who are potentially coming to get you," he said in the NPR interview. "So I understand why people are concerned about it."
"Look, the media is pursuing ratings," he added later. "This is a legitimate news story. I think that, you know, it's up to the media to make a determination about how they want to cover things."
