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Barack Obama, in his next memoirs, drops a series of colorful adjectives to describe the foreign leaders and politicians he encountered in his eight years in the White House, without holding back from expressing his opinions.
He said that Russian President Vladimir Putin reminded him of the tough and cunning neighborhood bosses who used to run Chicago’s political machine.
“Physically, he was unremarkable,” Obama said of his Russian counterpart, whom he surpassed, according to an excerpt from his memoir published in The New York Times.
Obama and Putin had a strained relationship during their presidency. In 2014, Obama led fellow world leaders in expelling Russia from the G8 for its annexation of Crimea.
Obama also admitted to being aware that Russia was trying to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign to see what Russia was doing, leading to Trump’s accusation that ‘ Obama spied on his campaign.
In his 768-page tome, titled “A Promised Land” and published on November 17, Obama describes his political career from the beginning to the end of his first term. It includes reflections on his personal life and his views on some of the biggest names in politics.
In his memoirs, Barack Obama described Russian President Vladimir Putin as ‘physically, he had nothing special’
He described then French President Nicolas Sarkozy as having ‘his chest pushed like that of a rooster cock’
Franco-American relations did not improve when a biography of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy claimed that Michelle Obama told the French first lady that life in the White House was “hell.” Both the Obama administration and the Elysee Palace denied it, above the two women in France in April 2009.
He described then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy as “with his chest extended like that of a rooster cock.”
‘A Promised Land’ comes out November 17
Those two men were also not the closest friendship – Obama sometimes had a higher approval rating among the French than Sarkozy – and relations did not improve when a Carla Bruni-Sarkozy biography claimed that Michelle Obama told the French first lady that life in the White House was “hell.” Both the Obama administration and the Elysee Palace denied it.
But the first French couple worked to improve French-American relations, gifting the Obamas with more than $ 40,000 in gifts in a single year, including a Hermes golf bag and a Baccarat crystal golf figurine of a golfer with his iron on the head. .
Obama also reveals his boredom in a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao. At the meeting, Hu read stacks of prepared papers, so monotonous that Obama considered suggesting “that we could save each other time simply by swapping papers and reading them as we please.”
The memoir, the first of two, recounts his first presidential election, his attempt to pass health care reform, and his work with Republican leaders in Congress, Senator Mitch McConnell and then-Speaker of the House, John Boehner. .
His mentions of President Donald Trump come from the prism of Trump’s criticism of himself, which includes fanning the lie that Obama was not born in the United States.
He notes that Trump’s musings were originally seen as a joke but came to regard them as part of the Republican Party’s attempts to appeal to the anxieties of white Americans about the first black president.
In that sense, there was not much difference between Trump and Boehner or McConnell. They also understood that it didn’t matter if what they said was true, ” he writes, according to an excerpt obtained by CNN, adding: “ In fact, the only difference between Trump’s policy style and theirs was the lack of inhibition.’
He also described McConnell as power-hungry, writing what the Kentucky senator “ lacked in charisma or interest in politics, ” he more than made up for with discipline, cunning and shamelessness, all of which he employed in the pursuit of power. resolutely and dispassionately. ‘
Obama described Mitch McConnell as power-hungry, writing what the Kentucky senator “ lacked in charisma or interest in politics that more than made up for in discipline, cunning, and shamelessness, all of which he employed in pursuit of the power of a single-mindedly and dispassionately. ”
In his memoirs, Obama described Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina as the guy in the spy thriller or heist movie ‘who betrays everyone to save his own skin’, above Graham meets with Obama and Joe Biden in January 2009 shortly before. Obama’s first inauguration
Obama talks about Donald Trump in the book through the prism of Trump’s criticism of him; The two men are seen in the Oval Office on November 10, 2016, a few days after Trump won the 2016 election.
And he has comments on other American politicians.
He complained to Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa who “was complaining and complaining about this or that problem he had with the bill without telling us what exactly it would take to get it done.”
He criticized Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate in 2008, for having “no idea what the hell he was talking about” on the subject of governance.
And he described Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina as the guy in the spy thriller or heist movie “who betrays everyone to save his own skin.”
In his book, Obama also talks about race relations in the United States and writes that it was his own historic election as the nation’s first black president that sparked the current division in the country.
“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 writes in the book, which was obtained by CNN.
Donald Trump, he claims, felt the mood of the country and took advantage of it to win the White House in the 2016 elections.
That is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he began selling claims that I was not born in the United States and therefore was an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans frightened by a black man in the White House, he promised them an elixir for their racial anxiety, ‘he writes.
But, Obama says, the roots of the problem came before the current president. It traces it back to John McCain’s decision to name Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election.
Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the fringes of the modern Republican Party – xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy towards blacks and brunettes – were finding their way into center stage, ‘Obama writes.
However, he goes on to hold McCain harmless, saying he believes the senator, who died of brain cancer in 2018, would not have made the same decision had he known what the future held.
“I’d like to think that given the opportunity to do it again, I could have chosen differently,” wrote Obama, who delivered one of the eulogies at McCain’s funeral. “I think he really put his country first.”
