President Donald Trump has hurled numerous insults at Democrats, the news media and even those in his own party.
But the president has also been on the receiving end, including from people who work in his administration.
“Fear: Trump in the White House,” by Bob Woodward, is the latest book to detail chaos in the president’s immediate orbit. Excerpts were published Tuesday and immediately brought to mind several disparaging comments that Trump’s staff is reported to have made about the commander in chief:
• Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Trump had the understanding of “a fifth- or sixth-grader,” according to accounts of Woodward’s book that were published by The Washington Post. The comments came after a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19 in which Trump questioned why the government was using resources to maintain a U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula. Mattis told Trump that presence was necessary “in order to prevent World War III.”
• White House chief of staff John Kelly called Trump “an idiot” and said he thought the president was “unhinged,” The Post also reported.NBC News first reported in May that Kelly had referred to the president as an idiot multiple times, in addition to making several remarks “insulting the president’s intelligence and casting himself as the savior of the country.” Kelly has denied that he ever called Trump an idiot.
• Omarosa Manigault Newman, who was the highest-ranking African-American staffer in the West Wing, claimed in a book published earlier this summer that Trump is a “racist, misogynist and bigot.” In her book, “Unhinged,” Manigault Newman said she witnessed Trump use racial epithets while describing presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George Conway, who is half Filipino.
