What Obama told his daughters on the morning Trump won the polls

November 18, 2016 23:04

Like millions of Americans, President Barack Obama was struggling to explain the results of last week's election, according to a New Yorker profile on the president.

But when Trump won the election in a shocking upset, Obama still had some comforting words to say to his daughters.

"What I say to them is that people are complicated," Obama 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. And 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. And it doesn't stop You don't get into a fetal position about it. You don't start worrying about apocalypse. You say, OK, where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward."

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