Barack Obama/Photo courtesy of Instagram
So far, two good books have come from the Obama presidency. However, a new book has recently gained attention for the author’s claims about the level of candidness with which former President Obama expressed his opinions on the racist Tea Party movement.
According to Edward-Isaac Dovere, former Chief Washington Correspondent for Politico and author of the upcoming book “Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaign to Defeat Trump,” Barack Obama did not hold back when asked his thoughts about the far-right political group that began in 2009 after the first Black president took office, Business Insider reported.
After a 2017 holiday party in Chicago for the Obama Foundation, he was asked how it felt to work with Jaime Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein, the heads of Chase and Goldman Sachs, respectively, after the Republicans tried to make him out to be an anti-capitalist. The former president responded matter-of-factly, “As for the Tea Party, well, they were racist motherf***ers.”
Although Obama was reticent to blame the Tea Party movement’s rhetoric on racism while he was in office, once he completed his final term, he openly addressed the predominant concern of members of the movement and some other whites in his memoir, “A Promised Land.”
According to Dovere, Obama did not hold back his feelings about his successor, Donald Trump.
While reflecting on the stunning victory of Trump, he said, “I didn’t think we’d have a racist, sexist pig,” and referred to the former reality star as a “f***ing lunatic.”
The former president also rightly assailed Trump on other occasions before he left office in 2017.
The 44th president has never been shy about his feelings towards Donald Trump, and his memoir drew the link between Tea Party racism and Trump’s victory in the 2016 election.
“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted,” Obama wrote. “For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he [Trump] promised an elixir for their racial anxiety,” he continued.
As shocking as this may be to some citizens, the former president did not say anything that most people, even the Tea Party movement itself, do not know.
The beloved former president has not yet responded to the claims in Dovere’s book.