US President Donald Trump made a series of light-hearted remarks about himself, former presidents and life in the White House during an appearance on Second Lady Usha Vance’s children’s podcast, Storytime with the Second Lady.The episode, released on Friday after being pre-recorded in mid-June in the Oval Office, featured Trump reading Presidents Play!, a children’s book published by the White House Historical Association. As he turned the pages, the president frequently departed from the text to share anecdotes, jokes and observations about past US leaders.When Vance asked whether he still found time to read for pleasure while serving as president, Trump replied: “So I end up reading mostly newspapers. I usually read stories about myself.”The book prompted Trump to comment on several of his predecessors. Looking at an illustration of President Gerald Ford swimming, he joked: “An outdoor pool was built for President Gerald Ford… I don’t get to use it. I don’t know if I look good in a bathing suit. I haven’t had a bathing suit in a LOOONG time.”Turning to a page featuring former presidents playing sports, Trump remarked: “Jimmy [Carter] as a tennis player, Barack Hussein Obama as a basketball player. I don’t know if he was a good basketball player. I tend to doubt it. Actually, his favorite sport is golf—but he won’t be in the Masters anytime soon.”He also joked about President William Howard Taft, saying: “He was a large man—very large… He was our heaviest president, and I have to be careful because I don’t want to supersede his record—and a thing like that would be possible if I allowed it to happen.”Elsewhere in the podcast, Trump described Lyndon Johnson as a “tough cookie”, called Ronald Reagan a “high-quality person”, and said John F. Kennedy was “the second-most good-looking president”. He also said he liked Bill Clinton “a lot”, joked that Richard Nixon “got himself into trouble”, and quipped that Herbert Hoover’s game of Hoover Ball “worked out better for him than the economy”.Asked why children should celebrate the Fourth of July, Trump said the United States was at “a little bit of a ledge right now” but added: “We’re going to make America greater than ever before.”
