“Fucking lunatic” and “corrupt motherfucker” are allegedly among the ways former POTUS Barack Obama has described his successor Donald Trump behind closed doors.
The alleged comments come from Atlantic writer Edward-Isaac Dovere’s new bookBattle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump, excerpts from which were featured in a Guardian piece this week. According to Dovere, Obama—starting in 2017—grew more directly critical of the former Apprentice host after initially preferring the thought of a Trump presidency to a Ted Cruz presidency.
“He’s a madman,” Obama is reported to have told donors to his foundation. The two-term president is also alleged to have called Trump a “pig” and—in response to Putin-focused reports at the time—a “corrupt motherfucker.” Elsewhere, Obama is said to have expressed surprise at how “bad” things got during Trump’s single term in the White House:
“More often: ‘I didn’t think it would be this bad.’ Sometimes: ‘I didn’t think we’d have a racist, sexist pig.’ Depending on the outrage of the day…a passing ‘that fucking lunatic’ with a shake of his head.”
Obama, of course, has been directly critical of Trump in the past, particularly leading up to and immediately following the 2020 election chaos. Speaking with Speedy Morman last November for Complex, Obama said—while he doesn’t “know what’s in his heart”—that Trump has proven himself to be “OK with” racist rhetoric.
“I’m less interested in figuring out the psychology of what a Donald Trump is than I am in making sure that our elected leaders are on the side of not discriminating against people, not being biased, not directing hate crimes against folks,” Obama said at the time.
In the same interview, he also assured Americans that Trump would indeed be leaving the White House following his election loss, which Trump responded to by championing detrimentally false claims of fraud.
“He may not like leaving,” Obama said. “He may not be a gracious loser. But he lost. And he will leave.”
Earlier this month, Twitter shut down an account that was sharing content identical to posts from Trump’s recently launched blog. Trump, notably, was permanently suspended from the platform in January following the fatal Capitol riot.
