Last month excerpts of the book “Confidence Man” obtained by The Daily Mail included a section that said former President Donald Trump claimed to remove an Oval Office toilet used by his predecessor.
“No, he apparently was not pleased about sitting on the White House toilet seat that Barack Obama had once used,” said a review published this week by The Los Angeles Times, appearing to confirm the leaked section.
According to The Daily Mail excerpt of the book – which was written by journalist Maggie Haberman of The New York Times and released Tuesday – Trump would tell certain White House guests that he had a personal ‘secret bathroom’ just off the Oval Office renovated, “using language one guest took to have racist subtext.”
Per excerpts available online, Haberman begins her book with the description of a phone call with Trump, a Republican who served one term in office from 2016 to 2020, following former President Obama’s two terms in office. In those first paragraphs, she mentions that Trump was supported by David Duke while running for office in 2016.
Duke is a white nationalist who “is the most recognizable figure of the American radical right, a neo-Nazi, longtime Klan leader and now international spokesman for Holocaust denial who has nevertheless won election to Louisiana’s House of Representatives and once was nearly elected governor,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Prior to Trump’s presidential campaigning, he also lead the “birther” movement based on false claims that Obama was not a U.S. citizen. ABC News reported in September 2016, little over a month before the election, that Trump admitted for the first time that Obama was born in the U.S.
“For close to four years now, he’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves,” said Obama of Trump in 2020, near the end of the latter’s time in office, according to CNN.
The Daily Mail said excerpts of Haberman’s book reveal that Trump would also call the private bathroom the “Monica room” in reference to the controversy regarding former Democratic President Bill Clinton and Monika Lewinsky.
“When Trump showed visitors his workplace, he invited some to peer into what he periodically described as his ‘secret bathroom,’ which he occasionally presented with the claim he had renovated the entire space down to the toilet,” wrote Haberman, The Daily Mail said.
In one instance, Trump made a comment that was “strange and vague and open to interpretation as to why he emphasized the changes, but the guest interpreted it to mean Trump did not want to use the same bathroom as his Black predecessor,” she wrote, according to the outlet.
However, Haberman reportedly noted that Trump’s claim about renovating the bathroom wasn’t even true. Officials allegedly said that only the toilet seat was replaced, which is a typical change when a new president takes office.
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