Despite Donald Trump’s relentless effort to kill his presidency and, later, every vestige of Obama’s historic legacy, former President Barack Obama exemplified almost preternatural restraint and affability.
According to a new book, Obama’s congeniality was put to the test behind the scenes, particularly during the contentious 2020 presidential campaign.
In his book Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump, author Edward-Isaac Dovere, a staff writer for the Atlantic, wrote that Obama had hit his breaking point and tore into his presidential successor. The book is set to be released on May 25, 2021.
“He’s a madman,” Dovere writes that Obama said of Trump, according to The Guardian, which published an excerpt. The British-based publication added that “big donors looking to squeeze a reaction out of him in exchange for the big checks they were writing to his foundation.”
Obama and Trump were known to despise each other, but Obama managed to maintain civility and amiability, at least in public. The Obama family, on the other hand, held Trump in high regard for his role in the notorious “birtherism” hoax when Obama was president, as well as his repeated attempts to repeal Obamacare after he became the 45th president.
“More often: I didn’t think it would be this bad. Sometimes: I didn’t think we’d have a racist, sexist pig,” Obama said of Trump, according to Dovere’s book.
Obama was also taken aback by the fact that Trump was speaking with foreign leaders, especially Russian President Vladimir Putin, without the presence of aides.
“That corrupt motherf—er,” Obama called Trump, The Guardian said Dovere reportedly wrote in the book.
