Former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg said that he “probably” called President Trump an “idiot” in a conversation detailed in a new book about the White House.
Nunberg, who was fired from the Trump campaign in 2015, told ABC News that the comment was sarcastic and that some of his comments in the book were taken out of context.
{mosads}”I’m not out here to criticize Michael [Wolff], but I think Michael used flourish — I’ll put it — on the events I described,” he told ABC News’s “The Briefing Room” Thursday.
The conversation between Nunberg and former chief strategist Stephen Bannon is included in Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
“‘If you can get this idiot elected twice,’ Nunberg marveled, ‘you would achieve something like immortality in politics,'” Wolff writes in the book.
Nunberg defended the comment as being sarcastic.
“I’m from New York and I’m very sarcastic,” he said, adding that he had not yet seen that excerpt from the book at the time. “I certainly probably said that but he’s by no means an idiot, at all.”
The former adviser didn’t deny the quotes attributed to him in the book.
“When I sat with Michael, who I like a lot, these were very casual type conversations and dinners and lunches,” Nunberg said. “I’m not disputing what he writes in the totality, I’m just trying to give it a little more color.”
Another portion of the book states that Nunberg had difficulty explaining the Constitution to Trump.
“’I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head,'” Wolff quotes Nunberg as saying.
Nunberg said the exchange between him and Trump took place during preparations ahead of the first Republican presidential primary debate.
“I wasn’t there to teach the president the Constitution. The president had a granular understanding of the Constitution, it was good enough,” he said. “It was around eight days before the first debate and I didn’t want him to have any gotcha questions.”
“Fire and Fury” drew quick criticism from the White House, which slammed it as “sad,” “pathetic” and including “numerous mistakes.”
Trump has also reportedly threatened to sue the book’s publisher.
The book’s publisher, Holt & Company, moved up the book’s publication date by four days to Friday over high demand.