CNN host Anderson Cooper said on his show Wednesday that President Obama may not be so silent about the Trump presidency when he leaves office, unlike George W. Bush when Obama entered the White House.
Since Trump's election in November, Obama has kept his opinion of the incoming Trump administration somewhat veiled, and said at his final press conference on Wednesday, "At my core, I think we're going to be OK."
"Clearly it seems one of the big headlines out of that press conference is that President Obama, when he is civilian Barack Obama, he's not going to stay quiet when he believed that what he talked about as the core values of America may be threatened," Cooper said to Kirsten Powers of CNN and USA Today.
"Yeah, I think that's really huge, especially when you compare it to how George W. Bush sort of went off into the sunset," Powers said.
"In fact, George W. Bush said that President Obama deserves his silence," Cooper interjected.
Powers agreed, saying that Obama and his supporters probably appreciated that.
"I mean, it's pretty clear that he's looking ahead, and I think that he's expecting that there's going to be some things that he's going to need to speak out about," she said. "These are things that he cares deeply about, and that there is a deep divide between him and Donald Trump."
Cooper pointed out that Bush could have spoken out when Obama was president to defend the core values of the Second Amendment, but he did not because he thought Obama "deserved silence."
"Why doesn't Donald Trump deserve President Obama's silence?" Cooper asked Van Jones, a CNN contributor and former Obama administration senior adviser.
"It's very simple. Because Obama came in to fix things that W. broke," Jones replied. "Trump's coming in to break stuff that Obama fixed. Literally the exact opposite situation."
"W., horribly unpopular; W., passing off a broken economy, passing off two terrible wars, said that Obama deserves my silence," Jones continued. "Obama, passing off a growing economy, passing off at least not two land wars, and frankly a country that under his leadership at least was rustling with some of these issues around inclusion. Trump coming in, saying 'all that sucks, I'm gonna break it.'"
At points during his final press conference, Obama made comments criticizing Trump's potential decisions, such as moving the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. Such "sudden unilateral moves" could have dire consequences, he said. Obama also rebuked Trump's remarks on removing sanctions on Russia over its aggression in Ukraine, saying that he should not "confuse why these sanctions have been imposed with a whole set of other issues."
Obama also told the press not to go easy on those in power.
"Cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power and make sure that we are accountable to the people who sent us here," he said on Wednesday.