Former House Speaker John Boehner’s new book, “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” reveals problems within his own party and issues with his own colleagues, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who he seems to loathe. The Ohio Republican doesn’t seem to care for former President Donald Trump, either, according to an excerpt from the book published by Punchbowl News on Thursday.
Boehner wrote that Trump had invited himself along to golf with Boehner and two insurance executives at a Trump golf course, and that ended up with the former president flying into a rage at a GOP staffer for getting the names of his golfing partners wrong. This was before Trump ran for president.
Boehner said he didn’t really know Trump before the golf outing.
“He was very friendly, but in an in-your-face, this-is-how-they-talk-in-New-York kind of a way that I was not used to at all,” Boehner writes. “Direct, loud, intense. Pretty much the same guy who got elected to the White House. I can tell you that with Trump, what you saw was what you got — for better or worse.”
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Boehner writes that Trump went over to John Criscuolo, a young staffer for the former House Speaker’s, and asked for the insurance executives’ names that they were golfing with. The staffer got the names wrong, though, saying they were “Joe and Jeff.”
When “Joe and Jeff” revealed that those weren’t their names by the end of the game, Boehner said that’s when Trump’s mood quickly changed.
Boehner blew it off and apologized, but he said of Trump, “This sort of glower fell across his face. The kind of look I could tell that you didn’t want to see too often if you happened to work for him.”
Trump, according to Boehner, got into Criscuolo’s face and yelled, “What are you, some kind of idiot?”
“You want to know how to remember somebody’s name?” Boehner recalled Trump saying to the staffer. “You f—ing LISTEN!”
“I’d never seen anybody treat a staffer like that – not in politics, not ever,” Boehner wrote. “This was more than New York bluster. This was real anger, over something very, very small. We had no idea then what that anger would do to our country.”
And knowing our volatile former president, as we all do by now, this doesn’t seem far-fetched — not even a little bit. He’s a walking rage machine.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
