President Donald Trump appeared as the “special reader” on the latest installment of “Storytime with the Second Lady” only to go wildly off script.
Sitting in the now-heavily-gilded Oval Office, Usha Vance told her target audience of grade-school-aged children, “When we read, we grow.”
She then asked Trump what he reads for fun, and the 80-year-old president claimed he reads mostly newspapers, and mainly about one topic.
“I usually read stories about myself,” he said.
Before starting to ‘read’ the book he picked, ‘Presidents Play!’, Trump took a moment to reminisce about his own childhood.
“When I was growing up we had a book called ‘Run, Spot, Run.’ That was the title of the book, and every sentence was of that complexity,” he said, adding that ‘Presidents Play!’ is more advanced.
After opening the book to begin reading, he quickly went off script. “This is Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. Two presidents, very different type presidents,” he said, pointing at the illustrations.
“Ronald Reagan was a high quality person,” he added of the Republican Cold War president and former movie star.
Moving through the presidents, Trump pointed out that the Tiber Creek, which John Quincy Adams was pictured swimming in, no longer exists.
“In fact, I think we’re building a beautiful ballroom on top of it based on this picture,” Trump said, plugging his pet project.
Trump described Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace after the Watergate scandal, as a president who got into trouble, and then admitted that “he got himself into trouble, I guess.”
Vance’s husband, Vice President JD Vance, recently claimed that if Watergate had happened today it would have just been a 12-hour news cycle, and would not have cost a president their job.
Trump described Bill Clinton, depicted on a running track, as “a nice guy.”
“I like Bill Clinton a lot. I still do,” he said.
But he couldn’t help throwing a little shade Barack Obama’s way. Calling him “Barack Hussein Obama,” Trump questioned the former president’s basketball skills, and then noted Obama’s favorite sport is golf, but added “he won’t be in the Masters’ anytime soon.”
He concluded his reading by musing that he should invite Joe Biden, Obama, and “the Bushes or Bush,” to watch football with him at the White House, seemingly momentarily forgetting that former President George H.W. Bush passed away in 2018.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
