WASHINGTON — Journalist Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury drew outsize attention this week, when excerpts were released that featured members of President Donald Trump’s administration openly questioning his mental stability, as well as explosive commentaries from his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.
Trump and the White House unleashed attacks against Bannon and threatened legal action against Wolff and his publisher. The book aimed up being released on Friday, four days ahead of its scheduled publishing date.
Here are some especially notable claims from the book to hold you over until you read the full thing.
According to Wolff, Ailes cautioned Trump about “potentially damaging material” coming up about the ties between his campaign and Russian officials.
Shortly after the election, his friend Ailes told him, with some urgency, “You’ve got to get right on Russia.” Even exiled from Fox News, Ailes still maintained a fabled intelligence network. He alerted Trump of potentially damaging material coming his style. “You need to take this seriously, Donald.”
“Jared has this, ” said a happy Trump. “It’s all worked out.”
Kushner, who has been assigned a rather large array of chores as a White House senior consultant, has faced plenty of scrutiny in the multiple investigations into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia last year.
Bannon told top Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller to use “the internet” as he drafted the administration’s famous immigration executive order.
The book paints an unflattering picture of Miller, who is responsible for shaping much of Trump’s platform — especially his anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy proposals. Miller knew little about policy or military matters, the book says.
Bannon “sent him to the Internet to learn about and to try to draft the[ executive order ], ” according to Wolff.
She treated her father with some lightness, even irony, and in at least one television interview she made fun of his comb-over. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an perfectly clean pate–a contained island after scalp reduction surgery–surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then sweep back and secured by a stiffen spray. The color, she would point out to comical impact, was from a product called Just for Men–the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.
Trump has a conspiratorial reason for his frequent intake of McDonald’s food.
He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s — nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that a busy schedule and strong work ethic maintains him from watching much television. “Primarily because of documents, ” he told reporters aboard Air Force One in November. “I’m reading documents. A lot. And different things. I actually read much more — I read you people much more than I watch television.”
According to Wolff’s book, Trump has three TVs in his White House bedroom, scarcely reads and battles to process info.
Trump didn’t read. He didn’t genuinely even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate.( There was some argument about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on articles about himself, and the rumor squibs on the New York Post’s Page Six .) Some supposed him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he just didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate–total television.
As Bannon told Wolff: “[ Trump’s] a guy who really detested school … And he’s not going to start penchant it now.”
In their efforts to “influence the president and undermine” one another, Bannon, Priebus and Kushner made a kind of “paralysis” within the White House that resulted each of the advisers to turn to the media, Wolff writes.
The constant leaking was often blamed on lower minions and permanent executive branch personnel, culminating in late February with an all-hands gratifying of staffers called by Sean Spicer–cell phones surrendered at the door–during which the press secretary issued menaces of random phone checks and warnings about the use of encrypted texting apps. Everybody was a potential leaker; everybody was accusing everybody else of being a leaker.
Everybody was a leaker.
At least some of the information about the inner workings of the White House came directly from Trump, Wolff writes.
In a series of tweets on March 4, 2017, Trump accused former President Barack Obama of surveilling him, offering no proof to support the claim. “This is McCarthyism! ” Trump wrote, adding that Obama was a “Bad( or sick) guy! ”
It was a turning point. Up to now, Trump’s inner circle had been mostly game to defend him. But after the wiretap tweets, everybody, save perhaps Hope Hicks, moved into a country of queasy sheepishness, if not constant incredulity.
Sean Spicer, for one, maintained recurring his daily, if not hourly, mantra: “You can’t make this shit up.”
Trump had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare. An overweight seventy-year-old man with various physical phobiums( for example, he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese ), he personally saw health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful topic. The details of the contested legislation were, to him, especially boring; his attention would begin wandering from the first words of a policy discussion.
During one particular health care discussion, Trump reportedly asked of his aides: “Why can’t Medicare simply cover everybody? ”
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway — arguably Trump’s most loyal defender — has what Wolff describes in the book as a “convenient On-Off toggle.”
In private, in the Off position, she seemed to regard Trump as a figure of exhausting exaggeration or even absurdity–or, at least, if you considered him that style, she seemed to suggest that she might, too. She illustrated her sentiment of her boss with a series of facial expressions: eyes rolling, mouth agape, head snapping back. But in the On position, she metamorphosed into believer, protector, defender, and handler.
Trump has multiple hypothesis that former President Richard M. Nixon was framed for the Watergate scandal.
Trump was reportedly reminded of the famous wiretapping scandal as the FBI’s Russia probe unfolded, and compared James Comey to John Dean, who was instrumental in unraveling the Nixon administration’s cover-up.
The president has “several revisionist theories” about Watergate and how Nixon was framed, the book says.
After a perceived win against Ivanka Trump over the Paris climate agreement, Bannon declared, “The bitch is dead.”
Wolff says the president’s plan to back out of the Paris agreement, announced in early June, was the move Ivanka Trump “had campaigned hardest against in the White House.” Bannon, who the hell is fought repeatedly against Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s White House influence, had supported the withdrawal.
“Score, ” Bannon said. “The bitch is dead.”
Wolff outlines four imagined scenarios justifying the meeting in Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, ranging from outright plot by the Trump campaign to mere amusement at the prospect of playing dirty campaign tricks on Hillary Clinton. Regardless of the reason, Wolff states that “practically nobody” doubted Trump himself was aware of the meeting.
“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero, ” Bannon said, according to Wolff. “Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
Bannon said “it simply brings the impeachment closer” if Trump were to fire Mueller.
There’s a “3 3.3 percent chance that the Mueller investigation would lead to the impeachment of the president, a 33.3 percentage opportunity that Trump would resign, perhaps in the wake of a threat by the cabinet to act on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment( by which the cabinet can remove the president in the event of his incapacitation ), and a 33.3 percent chance that he would limp to the end of his term, ” the former adviser said.
Bannon said he certainly doesn’t believe Trump will last eight years.
“He’s not going to make it, ” he said. “He’s lost his stuff.”
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