Barack Obama privately slammed Donald Trump as a ‘madman’ and a ‘racist’

Former US president Barack Obama privately called his successor Donald Trump a “corrupt motherfucker”, a “madman” and a “racist, sexist pig”, a new book has claimed.

During Trump’s presidency, “Obama largely abided by the convention that former presidents do not publicly criticise or attack their successors”, The Guardian reports. “But behind the scenes, with donors and advisers, Obama was reportedly much more candid.”

According to Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump by Edward-Isaac Dovere, a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine, Obama “first preferred the prospect of Trump as president to Ted Cruz”, the paper adds.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Democrat considered Trump to be “nowhere near as clever as the hard-right Texas senator, the runner-up in the Republican primary in 2016”, it continues. “But from 2017, as reality swiftly set in, Obama reacted like many in the US and around the world.”

“He’s a madman,” Dovere reports Obama telling “big donors looking to squeeze a reaction out of him in exchange for the big checks they were writing to his foundation”.

“More often” he would say “I didn’t think it would be this bad” or “I didn’t think we’d have a racist, sexist pig”, Dovere continues, adding that “depending on the outrage of the day” Obama would also call Trump “‘that fucking lunatic’ with a shake of his head”.

Obama also described the Republican as a “corrupt motherfucker” in response to “reports that Trump was speaking to foreign leaders – including Vladimir Putin, during the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow – without any aides on the call”, the paper adds.

While it is perhaps “no shocker that Obama and Trump aren’t each other’s biggest fans”, Obama’s public comments “haven’t come close to the R-rated descriptions alleged in the book”, which is published today, the New York Post reports.

Dovere last night tweeted that “there’s much more about Obama and his reactions to the last four years” in the book, adding: “There’s some cursing from him, but there’s also depth and reflection.”

Obama is also not alone in having his “alleged colourful language” exposed in the book, the New York Post adds. First Lady Jill Biden is quoted as saying that the now Vice-President Kamala Harris could “go fuck herself” after “a memorable debate-stage attack on Joe Biden early in the primary”, The Guardian says.

While Trump is “still kicked off social media, the former president hasn’t been shy about using his blog on his website” to voice opinions on “everything from Republican political machinations to coronavirus vaccines and notably, unpublished books where he is mentioned”, ABC News reports.

Earlier this month Trump wrote that “a guy named Miles Taylor, who I have no idea who he is, don’t remember ever meeting him or having a conversation with, gets more publicity pretending he was in the inner circle of our Administration when he was definitely not” in response to an upcoming book by the former government security official.

Despite this, he is “yet to weigh in on any of the freshly reported comments from Obama”, ABC News adds.