Before Donald Trump ever sought the Oval Office, he was preoccupied by its occupant President Barack Obama, publicly questioning his birthplace and privately describing him as "a Manchurian candidate" who obtained his Ivy League degrees only by way of affirmative action, according to a new book by Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen.
Trump's disdain for Obama was so extreme that he took his fixation a step further, according to Cohen: Trump hired a "Faux-Bama" to participate in a video in which Trump "ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him."
Cohen's book, "Disloyal: A Memoir," doesn't name the man who was allegedly hired to play Obama or provide a specific date for the incident, but it does include a photograph of Trump sitting behind a desk, facing a Black man wearing a suit with an American flag pin affixed to the lapel. On Trump's desk are two books, one displaying Obama's name in large letters.
CNN obtained a copy of Cohen's book ahead of its Tuesday publication.
Blacks & Latinos, 'They're not my people'
If Putin is held in the highest regard in Trump's mind, Cohen writes, Trump's own voters rank among those in the lowest. Speaking to Cohen after Trump gathered religious leaders at Trump Tower in the lead up to the 2012 presidential race, an encounter during which they asked to "lay hands" on him, Trump asked Cohen, according to the book: "Can you believe that bullsh*t?...Can you believe people believe that bullsh*t?"
In the wake of Trump's presidential kickoff announcement in 2015, in which he called Mexicans criminals and rapists, he dismissed concerns that he had alienated Latinos. "Plus, I will never get the Hispanic vote," Trump allegedly told Cohen. "Like the blacks, they're too stupid to vote for Trump. They're not my people." (Trump won 28% of the Latino vote in 2016.)
Trump's contempt, in Cohen's telling, extends broadly. Cohen characterizes Trump bluntly as racist, and says that while he never heard Trump use the "N-word," Trump used other offensive language.
Ranting about Obama after he won office in 2008, Trump said, "Tell me one country run by a black person that isn't a sh*thole...They are all complete f*cking toilets," according to Cohen. After Nelson Mandela died, Trump allegedly said of South Africa that "Mandela f*cked the whole country up. Now it's a sh*thole. F*ck Mandela. He was no leader."
Cohen also divulges personal details about Trump, including his hair routine, described as a "three-step" combover designed to disguise "unsightly scars on his scalp from a failed hair-implant operation in the 1980s."
Writing that he once witnessed Trump shortly after he showered, Cohen recalls that "when his hair wasn't done, his strands of dyed-golden hair reached below his shoulders along the right side of his head and on his back, like a balding Allman Brother or strung out old '60s hippie."
Many instances of Trump's alleged deceit have previously been detailed by Cohen and others in recent years: Trump's alleged inflation of his net worth to publications like Forbes and Fortune and his minimizing of the value of his properties to avoid taxes, Cohen's pressuring of the New York Military Academy to not release Trump's high school records to avoid their public disclosure, Cohen paying to rig CNBC and Drudge Report polls in Trump's favor, Trump campaign officials hiring extras for $50 apiece to attend Trump's 2015 announcement that he was running for president and the alleged fraudulent Trump University scheme, over which Trump settled a class action lawsuit for $25 million.
