 "US President Barack Obama (right) and President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday discussed a range of domestic and foreign policy issues at the White House during their first meeting in the Oval Office since Trump's stunning election victory. Photo: Re")
Donald Trump accused President Barack Obama of hobbling the transition to the Republican’s administration with unspecified “inflammatory” statements and “roadblocks,” as tensions between the two men spilled into the open less than a month before Inauguration Day.
“Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks,” the president-elect tweeted on Wednesday. “Thought it was going to be a smooth transition — NOT!”
Trump’s Twitter eruption was the culmination of a growing set of grievances topped by Obama’s decision last week to have the US abstain from a vote on a United Nations Security Council resolution declaring Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal. The move allowed the measure to pass, infuriating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump has promised to be friendlier to the US ally, a theme he emphasised on Twitter Wednesday.
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“We cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect,” Trump tweeted. “The beginning of the end was the horrible Iran deal, and now this (UN!) Stay strong, Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!”
His tweets came hours before Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, planned to describe in a speech his vision for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Netanyahu has said the UN resolution reduced the prospects for an agreement, while Trump announced earlier this month he would nominate his friend and bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman -- an ardent supporter of Israeli settlements -- as his ambassador to the country.
Other recent moves by Obama are also emerging as challenges to the incoming administration. Last week, he announced that more than 100 million acres of the U.S. Arctic and undersea canyons in the Atlantic Ocean would be protected from new offshore oil and gas drilling. He has encouraged Americans to enroll in Obamacare before the Jan. 31 deadline for 2017 sign-ups despite Trump’s vow to repeal the law, and the Environmental Protection Agency is moving rapidly to finalize mileage requirements for automakers months earlier than expected.
Obama has also needled Trump in recent public statements. In an interview published by CNN on Monday, the president said that he would have beaten Trump had he run for a third term. In a speech in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Tuesday commemorating the 1941 Japanese surprise attack that ushered the U.S. into World War II, Obama cautioned against “tribalism” and “the urge to demonize those who are different,” without mentioning the president-elect.
