It’s not exactly news that former President Donald Trump is a mean dude, but if you’ve ever wondered how mean he is really is, a memoir written by John Boehner should clue you in, especially in the example I’m providing here. He remembers a time when he was playing golf with then-businessman Trump, who was apparently in a rotten mood that day and at one point exploded at a staffer, calling him an “idiot” and screaming “f**king listen” when the staffer got a golfing partner’s name wrong, The Daily Mail reports.

In his book On The House: A Washington Memoir, due to be released Thursday, the former Republican House Speaker says that on that particular outing, Trump only played with a five handicap, leading Boehner to say he was “blown away” at how good he was at the game.

The two were paired together for a round of golf with two insurance executives for a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. This was years before Trump became President, while Boehner was House Minority Leader.

“He was very friendly, but in an in-your-face, this-is-how-they-talk-in-New-York kind of a way that I was not used to at all. Direct, loud, intense,” Boehner writes. “Pretty much the same guy who got elected to the White House. I can tell you that with Trump, what you saw was what you got — for better or for worse.”

“‘Boehner!’ Trump said when we were ready to start. ‘You and I are gonna take these two turkeys on and whip ’em.’ That was okay with me,” he writes, in the memoir, scheduled to be released April 13. The book is already no. 19 in books on Amazon, where it can be pre-ordered.

Because Trump and Boehner were placed together in the game at the last minute, and because Trump didn’t know the names of the two insurance executives, he asked Boehner’s aide John Criscuolo, who goes by the name BJ what their names were.

“I think they’re Joe and Jeff,” BJ replied. So Trump said hello to Joe and hello to Jeff and we set off,” Boehner writes of the Trump-Criscuolo interaction.

Then came the end of the game, in which Trump and Boehner were victorious, and Trump shook hands with the two men, and said “Good match Joe, well done Jeff.”

“Finally, one of the guys stopped us,” Boehner noted. “He had kind of a weird look on his face, and I could see something awkward was coming. ‘Guys,’ he said, ‘our names are Mike and David.'”

“We had been calling these guys the wrong names over and over, all day long, and they were either too polite or too shy to correct us the whole time,” per the excerpt.

Boehner didn’t view it as a big deal but for Trump, it was another story and he grew angry.

“This sort of glower fell across his face,” Boehner writes. “The kind of look I could tell you didn’t want to see to often if you happened to work for him.”

Then the situation really boiled over.

“He marched over to BJ and got right in his face to the point that BJ might have had to take a step or two back,” per the book. “Then Trump shouted ‘What are you, some kind of idiot? These guys’ names are Mike and David!”

“Then he gave the young man a piece of advice that he — and I —have never forgotten. And I hesitate to put an expletive in the mouth of a former president of the United States, but here it goes anyway. ‘You want to know how to remember somebody’s name?” Trump said. “You f**king LISTEN!”

Despite that rather sharp reprimand, Criscuolo continued working for Boehner.

“We laughed about that at the time, and since,” he adds, “[But] there was something dark about it.”

The two men couldn’t possibly have known just how dangerous Trump’s rage could be.

“I’d never seen anybody treat a staffer like that — not in politics, not ever. This was more than New York bluster. This was real anger over something very, very small.”

“We had no idea what that anger would do to our country,” Boehner noted.

During his four years as president, that anger turned venomous as he stirred racism and conspiracy theories that led to the deadly insurrection on Jan. 6. He set an anti-science agenda during a pandemic and on his last full day as President that pandemic claimed its 400,000th death. Far too many of us, myself included, feel shell-shocked from how mean he was to those he viewed as his inferiors and white nationalism awoke from its long sleep during this terrible dark, phase.

What Boehner witnessed became a nightmare for other people. The nightmare is now ending but how long will it be before we begin to accept it’s finally over?