President Donald Trump‘s disgraced former lawyer Michael Cohen is the latest Trump ex-insider to craft a book detailing their experiences in the Trump orbit, and the forthcoming tell-all goes into detail about Trump’s hatred for his predecessor, according to CNN.
In the book, which CNN says it obtained a copy prior to its Tuesday release, Cohen wrote that Trump, years before he jumped onto the campaign trail, went so far as to hire a lookalike of then-President Barack Obama to ridicule and fire what he called a “Faux-Bama.”
Cohen, who was Trump’s personal lawyer, writes in his book “Disloyal: A Memoir” that Trump was enamored with contempt for Obama, something that Trump has put on display as a notorious sounding board of the “birther” movement that questioned if Obama was born in America.
In the book, Cohen, a self-described “fixer,” writes that Trump felt Obama only received his education at Columbia University and Harvard Law School due to “f—ing affirmative action,” as stated by Business Insider. He even called Obama a “Manchurian candidate,” meaning that he was a puppet to enemy powers.
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Cohen, who was convicted of campaign finance violations and tax fraud in 2018 for his part in Trump’s 2016 campaign, said that he once hired, what he called, a “Faux-Bama,” to come to his office so he could ridicule him.
The book states that Trump intended to use the actor in a video in which he “ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him,” according to the CNN report.
According to Deadline, the video was intended to play at the 2012 Republican National Convention, when Mitt Romney was running against Obama for his second term. The video didn’t air due to the RNC being canceled for a day due to Hurricane Isaac.
The video has since resurfaced on the internet. Trump is seen interrogating the “Faux-Obama” in a performance review-style set-up of his first term, holding an Obama resume, grilling him about how “the private sector is dying,” and how to improve his golf swing.
In the end, Trump tells the lookalike “You’re fired,” mimicking his catchphrase from his popular ABC reality show, “The Apprentice.“
Trump has worn his contempt for former Obama on his sleeve ever since he took office in 2009.
Aside from the birther movement and attempting to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, Trump constantly tweeted disparaging critiques about Obama during his two terms in the White House and continues to this day.
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One of those tweets, “President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States,” was humorously read by Obama on NBC‘s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” weeks before the election in 2016.
“Well, @realdonaldtrump, At least I will go down as a president,” Obama quipped in reaction, simultaneously dropping the phone like dropping the mic.
We all know how that turned out.
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