Barack Obama's new book recounts his roasting of Donald Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner

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The then-president mocked Trump for his birther efforts and imagined what a blinged-out Trump White House would look like during the April 2011 dinner. The dinner was part of an eventful weekend for Obama. The next day, he announced the successful killing of Osama bin Laden. Obama writes in his book Promised Land: “As the audience broke into laughter, I continued in this vein, noting his ‘credentials and breadth of experience’ as host of Celebrity Apprentice and congratulating him for how he’d handled the fact that 'at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks….These are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.' The audience howled as Trump sat in silence, cracking a tepid smile. I couldn’t begin to guess what went through his mind during the few minutes I spent publicly ribbing him. What I knew was that he was a spectacle, and in the United States of America in 2011, that was a form of power. Trump trafficked in a currency that, however shallow, seemed to gain more purchase with each passing day. The same reporters who laughed at my jokes would continue to give him airtime. Their publishers would vie to have him sit at their tables. Far from being ostracized for the conspiracies he’d peddled, he in fact had never been bigger.”