A new book by journalist Edward-Isaac Dovere claims that Barack Obama called Donald Trump a “fucking lunatic” and a “corrupt motherfucker,” the Guardian reports.
In Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump, Atlantic staff writer Dovere also writes that Obama slammed Trump as a “madman” and a “racist, sexist pig.”
Obama made the “madman” remark to “big donors looking to squeeze a reaction out of him in exchange for the big checks they were writing to his foundation,” Dovere writes.
Trump was known for his frequent attacks on Obama, perhaps most notably for promoting the falsehood that his predecessor wasn’t born in the United States. He also called Obama “a disaster,” “the founder of ISIS,” and “the most ignorant president in our history.”
As of Thursday morning, Trump hadn’t responded to the statements reported in Dovere’s book. On his website, his most recent posts were about the Bank of America building in San Francisco and the actor Kirstie Alley.
In a starred review, a reviewer for Kirkus called Battle for the Soul a “wide-ranging history of a tangled campaign—catnip for politics junkies.”
Battle for the Soul is scheduled for publication next Tuesday.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
