In new passages added to his 2017 book, “Obama: The Call Of History,” New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker adds information depicting Obama viewing Donald Trump as a cartoon before Trump was elected, then turning on Hillary Clinton for tarnishing Obama’s legacy by losing to Trump.
As The Daily Mail reports, Baker writes that Obama was so disturbed by Trump’s victory that on Election Night he immersed himself in watching the film “Dr. Strange,” later slamming Hillary Clinton because she “brought many of her troubles on herself” and ran a “scripted, soulless campaign.”
Baker states that Obama compared himself to Mafia boss Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” moaning that he “almost got out” of the White House unscathed.
Baker writes that Obama thought there was “no way Americans would turn on him,” that Clinton was a veteran politician who would safeguard his legacy.
Baker notes that Obama could not believe that Americans could have “decided to replace him with a buffoonish showman whose calling cards had been repeated bankruptcies, serial marriages and racist dog whistles.”
Baker writes that after Obama met Trump in the Oval Office he was enraged, segueing to intermittent bouts of anger in the weeks following the election. Baker continues:
To Obama and his team, however, the real blame lay squarely with Clinton. She was the one who could not translate his strong record and healthy economy into a winning message. Never mind that Trump essentially ran the same playbook against Clinton that Obama did eight years earlier, portraying her as a corrupt exemplar of the status quo. She brought many of her troubles on herself. No one forced her to underestimate the danger in the Midwest states of Wisconsin and Michigan. No one forced her to set up a private email server that would come back to haunt her. No one forced her to take hundreds of thousands of dollars from Goldman Sachs and other pillars of Wall Street for speeches. No one forced her to run a scripted, soulless campaign that tested eighty-five slogans before coming up with “Stronger Together.”
Obama would never admit that the election loss had anything to do with him; soon after the 2016 election on a conference call with Democrats, he bragged:
Let me tell you something: We got more done than any administration in the last who-knows-how-many decades … Look, one of the challenges that I’ve discovered being president is I’d like to be organizer-in-chief, but it’s hard. You got Syria, and you got NATO, and you have summit meetings and economic issues that you have to deal with on ongoing basis. You try to get legislation done.
Only days after that, he bragged, in the face of contrary evidence, “I’m extremely proud of the fact that over 8 years we have not had the kinds of scandals that have plagued other administrations.”
In May 2017, People Magazine reported that after the election, Obama told friends of Trump, “He’s nothing but a bullsh**er.”
