Barack Obama and many of his fellow Democrats have loved nothing more than vilifying President Donald Trump and his supporters every chance they get. So it came as a huge surprise when a former Obama aide spoke out to defend Trump voters in a new interview.

Johanna Maska, who had worked for Obama, admitted on Monday that Trump supporters are not racist — she instead claimed they’d been “misled,” as The Daily Caller noted.

At the opening of “The Daily Briefing” on Fox News, Dana Perino showed a clip of former Vice President Joe Biden — who recently admitted to voters that his party erred when it “stopped talking to them.”

“You know Vice President Biden. You worked for him,” Perino said to Maska. “I would imagine he was frustrated during the 2016 campaign when Hillary Clinton said the word ‘deplorable.’ It was something that he would not have said initially.”

“I think she expressed regret,” Maska said, defending Clinton.

“I think for Joe Biden, it’s personal because he is from Scranton, Pennsylvania,” Maska went on.

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“And so when you grow up in a place where they voted for President Obama and then they voted for President Trump, you know that Trump voters are not deplorable,” she said. “They are not racist and they are not bad people, but they were misled.”

“Now is the time for the Democrats to be talking to all voters. No one should be off the table,” she added.

“Not if they want to win,” Perino said in agreement.

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This comes shortly after Obama himself spoke out to condemn the president after the recent tragedies in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

Though he did not mention Trump by name, it was clear Obama was trying to bash the president when he said Americans must “soundly reject language” from any political leader who “feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments.”

Obama likely would not be happy to see one of his former aides defending those who voted for Trump in any way.

This piece originally appeared in the Objectivist and is used by permission.

Read more at Objectivist.co:
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