Barack Obama. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
02 October 22
Obama calls Trump "corrupt motherf***er," and a 'f***ing lunatic"
Bess Levin Vanity Fair
As we’ve previously noted around these parts, the biggest criticism of Barack Obama between the years of 2016 and 2020 related to his decision not to voice the opinions you know he absolutely had about Donald Trump. Indeed, it was not even until the end of 2018 that the 44th president uttered his successor’s name in public, despite the fact that most of the world was regularly referring to him with terms like “certified moron,” “an idiot surrounded by clowns,” “Adolf Twitler,” and, we assume, “a malignant tumor on the colon of society.”
While Obama did choose to start talking toward the end of 2020—warning that August that Trump would “tear our democracy down” if given the chance—the remarks that he reportedly made in private were the ones people probably would have appreciated hearing the most, wherein he described the 45th president as “a madman,” “a racist, sexist pig,” a “corrupt motherfucker,” and a “fucking lunatic.” And apparently, he had other things to say about the guy too.
Bloomberg News reports that in his final days as president, Obama warned reporters, in an off-the-record conversation, that while America would be “okay” from four years of Trump, “eight years would be a problem. I would be concerned about a sustained period in which some of these norms have broken down and started to corrode.” (The remarks were revealed in a transcript that was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2017 by reporter Jason Leopold.) Trump has, of course, been threatening to make another bid for office for some time now, which, if successful, would give him those eight years Obama warned against. While that would obviously be extremely bad for humanity, one might argue that the country is already quite worse for wear after just the first four, and that Obama was a little too optimistic about how Trump’s first term would shake out.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Obama told reporters that he didn’t believe Trump was keen on starting any wars, though he would probably be into “bombing the heck out of terrorists.” (In early January 2020, the Trump administration assassinated Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani; Trump would later complain that he didn’t get enough credit for this, and that he should have because Soleimani was a much “bigger” terrorist than Osama bin Laden, whose 9/11 attacks he bizarrely attempted to downplay.) “I think his basic view—his formative view of foreign policy is shaped by his interactions with Malaysian developers and Saudi princes, and I think his view is, ‘I’m going to go around the world making deals and maybe suing people,’” Obama said during the chat. “But it’s not, ‘let me launch big wars that tie me up.’ And that’s not what his base is looking [for] from him anyway.”
According to Bloomberg, Obama said his biggest fear about his successor was the politicization of the nation’s top law enforcement agency. “I would be like white on rice on the Justice Department,” Obama told reporters. “I’d be paying a lot of attention to that. And if there is even a hint of politically motivated investigations, prosecutions, et cetera, I think you guys have to really be on top of that.” Trump, of course, spent much of his time in office demanding the DOJ investigate his political rivals, including Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. As Bloomberg notes, “Geoffrey Berman, the former US attorney for the Southern District of New York, recently accused Trump’s Justice Department of meddling in prosecutions and pressuring his office to launch politically motivated probes into Trump’s adversaries.”
In addition to opining on Trump, Obama reportedly offered his thoughts on the GOP, saying that “the Republican Party now is ideologically completely incoherent. You don’t know what they stand for. So what’s bound them together is opposition to me, opposition to a fantastical creature called the liberal who looks down on them and just feeds all that regional resentment. And there are a handful of issues, like guns, that trigger that sense of ‘these folks aren’t like us and they don’t like us and act like us.’ And there’s obviously some racial elements that get put out into that stew.”
Ginni Thomas swears she never once discussed her attempt to overturn the 2020 election with her husband, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas
And if you believe that, we’ve got a bridge to sell you. Per The New York Times:
During her interview, Ms. Thomas, who goes by Ginni, repeated her assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump, [Rep. Bennie] Thompson said, a belief she insisted upon in late 2020 as she pressured state legislators and the White House chief of staff to do more to try to invalidate the results. In a statement she read at the beginning of her testimony, Ms. Thomas denied having discussed her postelection activities with her husband.
In her statement, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Ms. Thomas called it “an ironclad rule” that she and Justice Thomas never speak about cases pending before the Supreme Court. “It is laughable for anyone who knows my husband to think I could influence his jurisprudence—the man is independent and stubborn, with strong character traits of independence and integrity,” she added.
In March, shortly before Thomas’s incredibly damning text messages with Mark Meadows regarding the 2020 election were revealed, she admitted in an interview that she’d attended the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the January 6 attack on the Capitol, adding, of her husband, “Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America.” But she also insisted: “We have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.” Which was about as believable then as it is now.
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