In a wide-ranging interview with New York Magazine, President Barack Obama ridiculed Republican lawmakers for their refusal to compromise with him, and mocked conservative Americans, whom he said think he is the “Antichrist.”

During the Aug. 28 interview, which was published on Monday, Obama discussed his two terms as president, and spoke in-depth about Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act and other pieces of legislation.

In regards to opposition to the 2009 Stimulus from former House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans, Obama said that he was previously known for reaching across the aisle to get things done in his home state of Illinois.

“I think one way of measuring my approach is that when I was in the Illinois Legislature, I famously got along with the Republicans there when I was in the minority and the majority,” he said. “And when I was in the Senate, I had good relations across the aisle.”

Obama, who has often been criticized for operating as a rigid, leftist ideologue, then lamented that he had been somehow likened to Russian communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and radical 20th Century community organizer Saul Alinsky during bipartisan meetings with congressional leaders.

“The notion that somehow I show up here and I become Saul Alinsky or Lenin in meetings with Republicans probably doesn’t ring true,” he said.

Obama continued:

Look, typically what would happen, certainly at the outset, it would be that I would say, “We’ve got a big problem: We’re losing 800,000 jobs a month. Every economist I’ve talked to, including Republican economists, thinks that we need to do a big stimulus, and I’m willing to work with you to figure out how this package looks.” And typically, what you’d get would be, “Well, Mr. President, I’m not sure that this big spending approach is the right one, and families are tightening their belts right now, and I don’t hear a lot of my constituents saying that they want a bunch of big bureaucracies taking their hard-earned tax money and wasting it on a bunch of make-work projects around the country. So we think that government’s got to do that same thing that families do.

“So you kind of hit that ideological wall,” he concluded.

Obama then said GOP lawmakers have been afraid to compromise with him out of fear their conservative constituents — who he said have been fed false narratives by conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh and Fox News — would throw them out of office.

“They’re looking at Charlie Crist down in Florida,” he said. “One hug [from me] and he was toast. Chris Christie couldn’t get his presidential race launched — it was basically over before it started — because he was too friendly and cooperative with me in accepting federal aid for a state that had been devastated by a hurricane [Sandy].”

Obama added: “They’re imagining the potential problems that arise, so it’s pretty hard for them to publicly say, ‘Obama’s a perfectly reasonable guy, but we just can’t work with him because our base thinks he’s the Antichrist.'”

Obama also briefly discussed the rise of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump during the longford interview, which he attributed to the 2008 ascension of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

“I see a straight line from the announcement of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential nominee to what we see today in Donald Trump, the emergence of the Freedom Caucus, the tea party, and the shift in the center of gravity for the Republican Party,” he said.

Obama added: “Whether that changes, I think, will depend in part on the outcome of this election, but it’s also going to depend on the degree of self-reflection inside the Republican Party. There have been at least a couple of other times that I’ve said confidently that the fever is going to have to break, but it just seems to get worse.”

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