READ ALL ABOUT HIS ‘FURY’
AN EXPLOSIVE book about President Trump and his first year in office offers a scathing portrait of a man who never wanted to be commander-in-chief.
“Fire and Fury,” a stunning exposé by Michael Wolff, details inner-circle secrets from Trump’s campaign and White House aides. It hits the shelves next week — but excerpts released Wednesday created an immediate furor.
TRUMP DIDN’T EXPECT TO WIN THE PRESIDENCY
“Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-inlaw Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cablenews star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn't become President, could return to inconspicuously lunching,” Wolff wrote.
FIRST DAUGHTER FOR PREZ
Ivanka Trump (right) followed her dad to the White House as an unpaid adviser with husband, Jared Kushner.
“The (couple) had made an earnest deal: If sometime in the future the opportunity arose, she’d be the one to run for President,” Wolff wrote. “The first woman President, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”
THE CONSTITUTION
“I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head,” former aide Sam Nunberg told Wolff about the time he was sent to explain the Constitution to Trump early in the campaign.
INAUGURATION
“Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He was angry that A-level stars had snubbed the event, disgruntled with the accommodations at Blair House, and visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears,” Wolff wrote.
BANNON AND THE RUSSIA PROBE
President Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, described a controversial meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner (inset, left to right), Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” to Wolff.
The former Breitbart head also told
SALLY YATES
Trump called his former acting attorney general (right) a “c--t” when she refused to have the Justice Department uphold his travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, Wolff wrote. “Trump conceived an early, obsessive antipathy for . . . Sally Yates. She was, he steamed, ‘such a c--t,’” the author wrote.
INFIDELITY
Trump had a trick he used when he wanted to pursue friends’ wives, according to Wolff. “Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends’ wives into bed. In pursuing a friend’s wife, he would try to persuade the wife that her husband was perhaps not what she thought. Then he’d have his secretary ask the friend into his office; once the friend arrived, Trump would engage in what was, for him, more or less constant sexual banter. ‘Do you still like having sex with your wife? How often? You must have had a better f--- than your wife? Tell me about it. I have girls coming in from Los Angeles at three o’clock. We can go upstairs and have a great time. I promise ...’ All the while, Trump would have his friend’s wife on the speakerphone, listening in,” Wolff wrote.
DOUBTFUL AIDES
Top Trump staffers expressed their doubts about his intelligence with colorful adjectives, Wolff claimed.
Secretary of State Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron” last year.
“For (Treasury Secretary) Steve Mnuchin and (former Trump White House chief of staff) Reince Priebus, the President was an ‘idiot.’ For (former Goldman Sachs exec) Gary Cohn, he was ‘dumb as s--t.’ For (National Security Adviser) H.R. McMaster he was a ‘dope.’ The list went on,” Wolff said.
HORRIFIED ALLIES
Wolff had a lot to say about the head of Trump’s National Economic Council and quoted from an email “purporting to represent the views of Gary Cohn” that circulated in the White House in April.
“It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything – not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant p---k who thinks he’s smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits ... I am in a constant state of terror and shock,” the email said, according to “Fire and Fury.”
Even media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a Trump supporter, hung up the phone after a conversation with the President about H-1B visas for select immigrants and said, “What a f---ing idiot,” Wolff wrote.