Wolff: Talk of Trump’s removal is alive every day
Author of tell-all book says president will not succeed and ‘is worse than everybody thought’
MICHAEL WOLFF, the author of the controversial White House tell-all book Fire and Fury, yesterday said there were grounds to believe President Donald Trump could be removed from office under the 25th Amendment of the US constitution. He said talk of the amendment – which states the leader of the US can be ejected from the presidency if he or she was deemed unable to fulfil their duties due to physical or mental impairment – is alive in the West Wing “every single day”.
The remarks came as the row over the book, repeatedly slammed by Mr Trump as “fiction” and “garbage”, continued to roil Mr Trump’s presidency.
He continued to lash out at his critics yesterday. “I’ve had to put up with the fake news from the first day I announced that I would be running for President,” he wrote on Twitter. “Now I have to put up with a fake book, written by a totally discredited author. Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!”
Speaking on NBC’S Meet the Press, Mr Wolff said he had no preconceived ideas about how the book would turn out and would have been delighted to write about an unlikely president who against the odds was going to succeed.
“[But] he is not going to succeed. It is worse than everybody thought,” he said. “It’s an extraordinary moment in time and the last several days focused on my book, I think is proof of this. This is not an exaggeration, and it’s not unreasonable to say this is 25th Amendment kind of stuff. [White House staff ] would say ‘we’re not at 25th Amendment level yet’. This is alarming in every way and then it went to ‘this is a little 25th Amendment’. So the 25th Amendment is a concept that is alive every day in the White House.”
The 25th amendment is a constitutional mechanism for replacing a president if he or she is unable to do his of her job or dies. It would lead to them being replaced by the vice president.
The veteran author and journalist went on to defend Steve Bannon, who incurred the full wrath of Mr Trump when he was quoted in the book saying a decision by Donald Jnr, Mr Trump’s son, to meet with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016 was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”.
He said: “Steve is a man of very clear beliefs and principles. He made Donald Trump president. He went into this campaign, it had imploded, it was over. Steve was the guy who said ‘there is a case here’.”
Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to mend fences, Mr Bannon broke his silence: “Donald jnr is a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda. My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda.”