US President Barack Obama has said there was a possibility of Republican Party nominee Donald Trump becoming his successor and warned that the real-estate magnate lacks a basic knowledge of the world and "doesn't seem to have an interest in learning".
"Anything is possible," Efe news quoted Obama as telling The Today Show's Savannah Guthrie when asked if Trump could be elected in November.
"What I think is scary is a President who doesn't know their stuff and doesn't seem to have an interest in learning what they don't know," the head of state said in the interview that NBC aired on Wednesday morning.
In his press conferences and the Republican debates, Trump has shown he lacks a "basic knowledge about the world, or what a nuclear triad is, or where various countries are, or, you know, the difference between Sunni and Shia in the Muslim world", Obama said.
"Those are things that he doesn't know and hasn't seemed to spend a lot of time trying to find out about."
He also said the magnate was wrong to assert that he alone can solve the United States' problems because "that's not how our founders designed our system".
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"We're not a government where some strong man orders people around and banishes enemies. I think that it's important for us to remember that we live in a democracy. And by definition, then, the way we solve problems is by everybody participating and arguing and occasionally having to compromise," the President said.
Obama, who on Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia will make the case for electing his party's nominee, Hillary Clinton, said Trump "is somebody who likes attention, maybe surprised himself that he got this far" in the presidential race.
"So, my advice to Democrats -- and I don't have to give this advice to Hillary Clinton, because she already knows it -- is you stay worried until all those votes are cast and counted," Efe news quoted the President as saying.
"One of the dangers in an election like this is that people don't take the challenge seriously. They stay home. And we end up getting the unexpected," he added.
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