Former President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes warned on Wednesday of people over-reading the election of Donald Trump as a "rebuke of Obama."
"You can over-read it as a rebuke of him," Rhodes said. "I think he would have won a third term if he could have run."
Rhodes, who currently is promoting his new White House memoir, The World As It Is, explained Obama's reaction to reality star and businessman Donald Trump's surprise victory in 2016. In his new book, Rhodes gives a deeper look into how Obama reacted to the election results, which included questioning if he became president "too early."
CNN "New Day" host John Berman asked Rhodes if Obama has come to terms with the 2016 election being a reaction to him.
"But it's hard to look at the results of the election as anything other than a reaction to President Obama, and you write about this a lot. It's got to be hard – has it been hard for him to come to terms with that?" Berman asked.
"What I write about essentially is that he went through the same process as all of us," Rhodes said. "On election night, he called me kind of shell-shocked: 'Oh that happened. What do we do now? Let's pick ourselves up and brush ourselves off.'"
Rhodes added that he hoped in 10 to 20 years the country will look more like "Barack Obama's America" than Trump's.