Barack Obama.Photo: ALEX EDELMAN/AFP via Getty
The right-wing Tea Party movementsprouted up in 2009, and was at the time focused on undoing Obama’s landmark health care law and enacting conservative fiscal policies.
According toBusiness Insider, Dovere writes that Obama, 59, referred to Trump, 74, as “a madman,” and once said of his presidency: “I didn’t think it would be this bad.”
Obama also reportedly said of Trump: “I didn’t think we’d have a racist, sexist pig,” and referred to the former reality star as a"f—ing lunatic"and a “corrupt motherf—er” when it was reported that Trump had phone calls with foreign leaderswithout any American aides listening in.
As PEOPLE earlier reported for its2017 cover story on the 44th president, Obama on election night 2016 privately called Trump “nothing but a bullshitter,” according to sources close to the then-president.
Sources told PEOPLE the comment came while Obama was describing an election night phone call with Trump, in which the businessman suddenly professed his “respect” and “admiration” for his predecessor, followingyears of hectoringand promulgating the racist “birther” conspiracy theory.
Obama’s opinion didn’t seem to change much over the next four years, with the former president often criticizing Trump’s tenure in officewhile campaigningforJoe Biden, his former vice president.
At an October 2020 drive-in rally for the then-Democratic nominee, Obama slammed Trump, saying he wasn’t focusing on the well-being of the country and was instead only working to promote himself using a “reality show” style of politics.
“[Trump] hasn’t shown any interest in doing the work or helping anybody but himself or his friends or treating the presidency as anything more than a reality show to give him the attention that he craves,” Obama said. “But unfortunately, the rest of us have to live with the consequences.”
In the statement, Obama assailed Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, saying, “For two months now, a political party and its accompanying media ecosystem has too often been unwilling to tell their followers the truth — that this was not a particularly close election and that President-Elect Biden will be inaugurated on January 20.”
“Their fantasy narrative has spiraled further and further from reality, and it builds upon years of sown resentments. Now we’re seeing the consequences, whipped up into a violent crescendo,” Obama said.
In her own 2018 memoirBecoming, Obama’s wife, former First LadyMichelle Obama, wrote about her true feelings on Trump, blasting his birther crusade against her husband as “crazy and mean-spirited … its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed.”
Writing that she would “never forgive him” for stirring up the false birther movement in 2011, which she said endangered her two daughters, Sasha and Malia, Mrs. Obama wrote that Trump’s lies were “dangerous,” and “deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.”
source: people.com
