DON SAYS 'SHELVE' THE BOOK!
So pub date moved up
President Trump on Thursday demanded that the author and publisher stop the release of an explosive exposé that portrays him as a childlike bungler unfit to be commander in chief.
One of the president’s personal lawyers, Charles Harder, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Michael Wolff, author of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” and Steve Rubin, president of publisher Henry Holt and Co., seeking to its block publication.
In response, the publisher pushed up release of “all formats” of the book from its scheduled onsale date of Tuesday to 9 a.m. Friday.
And Wolff took to Twitter to thank Trump for the early release — and all the free publicity.
“Here we go. You can buy it (and read it) tomorrow. Thank you, Mr. President,” he wrote.
Harder also demanded that Wolff and Rubin issue a “full and complete” retraction and apology.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders called the author’s contention that Trump’s senior staffers believe he is unfit to be president “disgraceful and laughable.”
“If he was unfit, he probably wouldn’t be sitting there,” she said, while repeatedly trashing the book — which extensively quotes Trump’s former top strategist, Steve Bannon — as “full of false and fake information.”
Asked if Bannon should be canned from his job heading the conservative Web site Breitbart, she replied, “I certainly think that it’s something they should look at and consider.”
Afew hours after that comment, Bannon’s billionaire financial patron, Rebekah Mercer — an investor in Breitbart — announced she was cutting ties with him.
“I support President Trump and the platform upon which he was elected,” said Mercer in a rare public statement.
Trump earlier in the day, when asked about Bannon’s scathing comments, said he “called me a great man last night so . . . he changed his tune pretty quick.”
“I don’t talk to him. I don’t talk to him,” he added, before offering the malaprop, “That’s just a misnomer.”
He later turned to Twitter to blast Bannon and Wolff, calling his former aide “Sloppy Steve” and saying the book is “full of lies.”
While Trump and his lawyers have threatened to sue Wolff and Holt, a noted First Amendment lawyer predicted any such court action would fail.
“The last time a court entered an injunction against publishing of anything that mattered to this degree involved the Pentagon Papers,” said lawyer Alan Neigher, of Westport, Conn.
“And that lasted a few days before it was overturned. I don’t think that this rises to that level — it’s not a national-security issue, and even if an order was issued, it would be overturned because of the First Amendment.”
The Wolff book portrays Trump as an undisciplined man-child who didn’t actually want to win the presidency, and quotes Bannon as calling Donald Jr.’ s contact with a Russian lawyer “treasonous.”
Wolff also wrote that Trump used to boast that one of the things that made “life worth living” was sleeping with his friends’ wives.
“In pursuing a friend’s wife, he would try to persuade the wife that her husband was perhaps not what she thought,” Wolff quotes a Trump friend as saying.
The book also says First Lady Melania Trump has been seen so infrequently in the West Wing that staffers have started referring to Trump daughter Ivanka as his “real wife” and aide Hope Hicks as his “real daughter.”