Trump hired a ‘Faux-Bama’ to ‘ritualistically belittle’ and fire during 2016 race, claims Michael Cohen

Cohen also claims president said Mr Obama only obtained his Ivy League degrees through affirmative action

Donald Trump hired an actor to impersonate Barack Obama, such was his fixation with the president, according to his former fixer Michael Cohen.

In Cohen’s new book, the former attorney for the president says that Mr Trump hired the “Faux-Bama” to take part in a video in which he “ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him”.

An account of the incident is included in Disloyal: A Memoir, due to be published on Tuesday, but does not mention a specific date, nor the name of the man who was allegedly hired as a lookalike of President Obama.

A photograph obtained by CNN shows the man sitting across the desk from Trump in his office, wearing a suit with an American flag pin. Trump is reading a piece of paper and a book can be seen with Mr Obama’s name written on it.

The video has since been obtained by Breitbart and is formatted as a parody of The Apprentice, supposedly to be shown at the Republican National Convention in 2016.

Trump has long had an obsession with the man who he would succeed in the White House. Throughout the Obama presidency, Trump questioned the veracity of his birth certificate.

Cohen says in the new book that Mr Trump also described President Obama in private as a “Manchurian candidate” and claimed that his Ivy League degrees were only obtained through affirmative action.

Ahead of publication, Cohen described the president as “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man”. He says that he is uniquely positioned to reveal details of Trump’s life.

In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to nine federal crimes including tax evasion, campaign finance violations to help Trump win the 2016 election, and lying to Congress.