Portrait in new book
They didn't have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s**t, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately. A whale of a Trump tale, but is it a bit fishy?
Among the many things he’s been called — “blunt,” “pathetic,” “calculating” — Michael Wolff has never been described as boring.
A provocateur and media polemicist, Wolff has a penchant for stirring up an argument and pushing the facts as far as they’ll go, and sometimes further than they can tolerate, his critics say. He has been accused of not just re-creating scenes in his books and columns, but of creating them wholesale.
That’s some context for Wolff’s scathing new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, describing dysfunction and infighting in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the first year of his presidency.
Trump isn’t exactly disputing Wolff’s reporting, nor has strategist Steve Bannon backed down. The fireworks almost guarantee the book
says that his book is based on 200 conversations over the past 18 months with Trump, most members of his senior staff, some of whom he talked to dozens of times, and many people with whom they had spoken. Some conversations were on the record, while others were off the record or on “deep background,” allowing him to relay a “disembodied description of events provided by an unnamed witness to them”.
In the book, set to be officially will be a bestseller. But the secondguessing has begun.
Wolff, for example, writes that Thomas Barrack, a friend of Trump’s, told a friend that Trump is “not only crazy, he’s stupid”. Barrack denied to the New York Times that he had ever said it. Katie Walsh, a former White House adviser, has also disputed a comment attributed to her , that dealing with Trump was “like trying to figure out what a child wants”.
Wolff, 64, has said his book was based on 200 interviews with White House and campaign staffers.
His reliability has been challenged before — over quotes, descriptions and general accounts he’s provided in his many newspaper and magazine columns and in several books. released next week, Wolff writes that the Trump campaign did not expect to win the election.
Wolff writes: “In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can't win unless you believe that you will win — except in the Trump campaign. The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how everybody involved in it was a loser. He was equally convinced that the Clinton people were brilliant winners — ‘They've got the best and we've got the worst,' he frequently said. Time spent with Trump on the campaign plane was often an epic dissing experience: Everybody around him was an idiot.”
Wolff writes about several instances in which Trump’s lack of knowledge and interest in public affairs was evident.
Katie Walsh, formerly a deputy chief of staff, is quoted in the book as saying that dealing with Trump was like dealing with the whims of a child and that the White House could not decide on three main priorities six weeks into the Administration.
Wolff writes that Trump was in a foul mood as he assumed office, fighting with first lady Melania Trump on Inauguration Day and bringing her to the verge of tears. Wolff details how Trump did not take well to living in the White House, recounting a reprimand to the housekeeping staff for picking his shirt up from the floor. Trump also reportedly imposed a rule that no one touch his toothbrush.
Wolff describes at length the competing power centres in the early days of the Trump White House: Reince Priebus, the chief of staff; Bannon; and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. “For Walsh, it was a daily process of managing an impossible task: almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, she would be countermanded by one or another of them,” Wolff writes.
In early October, after reports that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had called Trump a “moron,” other senior advisers had “there-but-for-the-graceof-God” moments, Wolff writes. Some had called Trump an “idiot,” “dumb as s**t” and a “dope,” according to Wolff.