ET TU, BANNON?
Guru unloads on Trump White House Prez: ‘He lost his mind’
A bombshell new book that paints President Trump as a half-wit who bumbled his way into a job he never wanted — and now presides over a deeply fractured and incompetent administration — rocked the White House on Wednesday, when early copies arrived in newsrooms.
Many of the most explosive tracts in journalist Michael Wolff ’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” out Tuesday, come from embittered former White House strategist Steve Bannon.
Prior to Bannon’s ouster, the Trump White House is portrayed as being engaged in an ongoing power struggle between the Breitbart publisher and a faction headed by Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner.
Following reports that Kushner had tried to set up a private communication channel with the Kremlin, Bannon called Ivanka a “f--king liar’ in front of the president.
Trump responded only by telling her, “I told you this is a tough town, baby,” according to Wolff ’s book.
Few of the claims in the book are directly sourced, including one that Trump didn’t expect to win the election and wife Melania wept openly when he did.
“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 rival Hillary Clinton’s people were brilliant winners — ‘They’ve got the best and we’ve got the worst,’ he frequently said,” Wolff writes.
But as election night rolled on, and it became increasingly clear that Trump could take the presidency, the book claims: “Don Jr. told a friend that his father . . . looked as if he had seen a ghost” and Melania, whom he’d “guaranteed” that he could not win, “was in tears — and not of joy.”
Within weeks of Trump taking office, his entire inner circle — except Hope Hicks — had privately stopped defending the commander in chief ’s actions and outbursts, Wolff writes.
“You can’t make this s--t up,” became press secretary Sean Spicer’s mantra, he says.
Wolff writes in the book’s foreword that he originally approached the White House about doing a fly-on-the-wall account of the administration’s f irst 100 days but was in- stead given a “semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing,” where he conducted more than 200 interviews with the president and his staffers.
Bannon also lashes out in the book at Trump’s other kids — calling the notorious Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a group of Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”
“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers,” Bannon told Wolff.
“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.”
He insists Trump must have known about it.
“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the 26th floor is zero,” Bannon said.
The book then recounts Trump’s team going into damage control aboard Air Force One when the meeting was publicly revealed — where Wolff says they engaged in a “realtime coverup,” penning a response falsely claiming that the meeting was simply about Russian adoption policy.