"This stings," Obama told staffers during an Oval Office meeting in the weeks after the election, a source told David Remnick of The New Yorker. Baker describes Obama as deeply skeptical of Trump and mystified at why voters chose him over the more experienced Clinton. And he writes that Obama and some of his aides faulted Clinton and her campaign decisions for the outcome, which shocked the then-president. "To Obama and his team, however, the real blame lay squarely with Clinton," Baker writes in the book. Never mind that Trump essentially ran the same playbook against Clinton that Obama did eight years earlier, portraying her as a corrupt exemplar of the status quo.

Source: CNN May 04, 2019 23:15 UTC