Washington DC: Former FBI director James Comey says in a new book that President Donald Trump reminded him of a mafia boss who demanded absolute loyalty, saw the entire world against him, and lied about everything.
According to excerpts of the book leaked by US media on Friday, Trump was also obsessed with the alleged existence of a video in which Russian prostitutes said to be hired by Trump urinated on the bed in a Moscow hotel room.
In the book to be released officially next Tuesday, Comey, whom Trump fired in May 2017, says the US president lives in "a cocoon of alternative reality" that he tried to pull others around him into, according to The Washington Post.
Meetings with Trump gave Comey "flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob," he writes.
"The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organisation above morality and above the truth."
But Comey goes farther to say that Trump, congenitally, has no sense of what is right and wrong. "This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values," he writes, according to The New York Times.
"His leadership is transactional, ego driven and about personal loyalty."