John Boehner recalls Trump berating a staffer as an 'idiot' and shouting at him to 'f---ing listen!'

In another excerpt from his upcoming book, former House Speaker John Boehner writes that he'd "never seen anybody treat a staffer" like former President Donald Trump once did.

Boehner will release his memoir On the House next week, and on Thursday, Punchbowl News published an excerpt in which Boehner recalls once golfing with two insurance executives and Trump before he was elected president.

The former Republican leader says that as the group was getting ready to play, Trump asked a young staffer of Boehner's, who they called BJ, for the names of the two executives, and the staffer said, "I think they're Joe and Jeff." This turned out to not be correct, and when Trump and Boehner discovered they had been repeatedly calling the executives by the wrong names, the future president was allegedly quite upset.

Subscribe to 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

"He marched over to BJ and got right in his face to the point that BJ might have had to take a step or two back," Boehner writes. "Then Trump shouted, 'What are you, some kind of idiot?' He pointed to the rest of our impromptu foursome. 'These guys’ names are Mike and David!'"

Boehner goes on to write that Trump shouted at the staffer, "You want to know how to remember somebody’s name? You f---ing LISTEN!" Though Boehner says that "we laughed about that at the time, and since," he adds that "I'd never seen anybody treat a staffer like that," and he suggests that there was "something dark" about this incident.

"This was real anger, over something very, very small," Boehner writes. "We had no idea then what that anger would do to our country."

The new excerpt from Boehner's book comes after The New York Times published quotes from it in which the former Republican leader rips into Trump, saying he incited a "bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons" while calling his election fraud claims "bulls---."