‘Discreet location’ sought by Barack Obama in the White House

There is a secret that Barack Obama hid during his presidency in the White House that he finally confessed.

The former US president revealed the bad habit in his new memoirs this month.

For years, people had speculated whether Obama had quit smoking, which he promised his wife Michelle he would do before he ran for president.

He had never been caught or photographed with a cigarette, but people had seen nicotine gum on his desk.

Now Obama has revealed that he smoked eight or nine cigarettes a day in the White House and only quit when his daughter Malia caught him.

In the 768-page book A Promised Land, Obama admits that the stress of being president led him to find a “discreet place to smoke at night.”

After Malia “frowned” after “smelling a cigarette on my breath,” she said she quit smoking by chewing nicotine gum “incessantly.”

He also details how his time in the White House affected his marriage, in a copy of the memoirs obtained by CNN.

“Despite Michelle’s success and popularity, I continued to feel an undercurrent of tension in her, subtle but constant, like the faint hum of a hidden machine,” he writes.

“It was as if, confined as we were within the walls of the White House, all of his previous sources of frustration became more focused, more vivid, whether it was from my engrossed work twenty-four hours a day or the way that politics exposed our family to scrutiny and attack, or the tendency of even friends and family to treat their role as secondary in importance. “

Obama said there were nights “lying next to Michelle in the dark, I thought of those days when everything between us felt lighter, when her smile was more constant and our love less cluttered, and my heart suddenly clenched at the thought that those days may not come back. “

Obama also details how Donald Trump promised an elixir for the “racial anxiety” of “millions of Americans scared by a black man in the White House.”

“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a feeling that the natural order had been disrupted,” he said.

“Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started selling claims that I was not born in the United States and therefore was an illegitimate president.”