WHOOPS

Donald Trump Gave Obama ‘B+’ in 2009

The current GOP frontrunner, who now constantly assails Obama’s performance, was once a generous fan of the president, saying he inherited a mess.

Donald Trump hates President Obama. Donald Trump is the antithesis to President Obama. Donald Trump valiantly pushed President Obama to release his birth certificate.

And in 2009, Donald Trump said that President Obama was a pretty great president.

That was back when the GOP frontrunner was frequently blogging on Trump University’s website (when the unaccredited university still existed). Trump’s posts included everything from assessments of the state of Jessica Simpson’s marriage to reasons why certain contestants on The Apprentice got axed from the show.

But he often weighed in on politics, and in the first year of Obama’s presidency, Trump could not have been much more gracious to the incumbent, at one point awarding Obama a “B+” on his first 100 days in office.

“I was asked if he had lived up to the challenge,” Trump wrote on April 30, 2009, in reference to an interview he had granted CNN the day before. “I said that he is working very very hard on many many fronts—it would be nice if he could focus on one but he wasn’t really given that option.”

Trump went on to say that Obama should be given some benefit of the doubt because he walked into a difficult situation.

“The option he was given is that the world no longer respects us like they did ten or fifteen years ago, but he’s building bridges, he’s building them back,” Trump said, of a man to whom he now targets his vitriol. “Certainly the economy is a problem, and terrorism. He inherited a real mess.”

Before a rally on Thursday where Trump assailed Romney for not being able to beat the “failed president” Barack Obama, BuzzFeed News first reported on the pro-Obama posts. Trump suggested that Mitt Romney was willing to fellate him for an endorsement and the tangerine-headed demagogue said, “I am not a fan of Barack Obama.”

He was much more gracious in 2009.

“It’s become a world of specialization, it’s very complex, and the level of problems that the world has today is unprecedented,” Trump continued on his blog. “We’re not in a great stage right now in [sic] and the problems he’s dealing with—from health care to pirates—is formidable.”

“I gave him an overall grade of at least a B+ and I think he’s lived up to his challenges in a big way. As the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told him, ‘You’ve changed America’s relationship with the world.’”

This is not the only time he wrote to praise Obama either.

In a March 18, 2009, post, Trump reminded his devoted students that he was on CNN the previous night: “Then Larry [King] asked me how I thought Obama is doing,” Trump wrote. “He is really trying, but he inherited a total mess. However, I think he will be successful—although I also believe things could get a bit worse before they get better. He’s doing as well as can be expected.”

Six months later, Trump was back on the air and praising Obama—and blogging about it—for his handling of the bank bailout, a particular cause for ire among Tea Partiers.

“I was on Neil Cavuto’s show yesterday for an update of what’s happening with the economy,” Trump wrote on October 1, 2009. “On the whole I’m feeling much better than a year ago. They did the right thing with the banks or we’d be in a major depression now.”

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Gideon ResnickPolitical Reporter

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