President Obama: if Donald Trump doesn’t take job seriously, he “won’t be there very long”

| 4:35 pm EST November 17, 2016
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In the days since the election, President Obama has shown Donald Trump a notable degree of hospitality, despite Trump’s erratic and extremist nature and the illegitimacy an Electoral College “victory” despite Trump losing by millions of votes. Obama has even offered a clearly overmatched Trump a series of tutoring lessons on how the Presidency works. But while standing alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday, President Obama issued a stern warning to Trump about how things are likely to go if he treats the Presidency as a joke.

In the days since Donald Trump was declared the “president-elect” and millions of Americans poured into the streets in protest, foreign leaders around the world have found it difficult to get ahold of Trump, as they try to figure out what his often-contradictory foreign policy stances might be. President Obama aimed to quell those fears today as he appeared alongside Merkel, telling foreign leaders that Trump’s days will be numbered if he doesn’t get his act together.

“If you’re not serious about the job, you probably wont be there very long,” Barack Obama told the world today (supporting source: USA Today) in obvious reference to the erratic Donald Trump. He only went on to add that a lack of seriousness will “expose problems” in that administration, but he didn’t specify whether he was suggesting that Trump could be a one-term president, or whether he was suggesting that Trump could be impeached before then.

But in any case, now that President Obama has offered Donald Trump the initial cordiality and assistance out of the gate that the nature of American democracy demands, he’s now throwing down the gauntlet in terms of expressing just how poorly he expects Trump’s tenure to play out for him. Meanwhile Obama has not revealed what he may be working on behind the scenes in terms of trying to make his policies more permanent before leaving office.