Dovere reports that Obama first preferred the prospect of Trump as president to Ted Cruz, because Trump was nowhere near as clever as the hard-right Texas senator, the runner-up in the Republican primary in 2016. But from 2017, as reality swiftly set in, Obama reacted like many in the US and around the world. “He’s a madman,” Dovere reports Obama telling “big donors looking to squeeze a reaction out of him in exchange for the big checks they were writing to his foundation”. “More often: ‘I didn’t think it would be this bad.’ Sometimes: ‘I didn’t think we’d have a racist, sexist pig.’ Depending on the outrage of the day … a passing ‘that fucking lunatic’ with a shake of his head.”