FIRE AND FURY

In this explosive book, Wolff provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office. Among the revelations:

— What President Trump’s staff really thinks of him

— What inspired Trump to claim he was wire-tapped by President Obama

— Why FBI director James Comey was really fired

— Why chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner couldn’t be in the same room

— Who is really directing the Trump administration’s strategy in the wake of Bannon’s firing

— What the secret to communicating with Trump is

— What the Trump administration has in common with the movie The Producers

Never before has a presidency so divided the American people. Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.

Michael Wolff’s Withering Portrait of President Donald Trump

Michael Wolff, the author of the new book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” extracts from which set the Internet ablaze on Wednesday, is an experienced magazine journalist. Among the publications on his résumé are New York, Vanity Fair, and the Hollywood Reporter. A chronicler of media, power, and wealth, Wolff is also willing to dish the dirt, as he demonstrated in a gossipy tome about Rupert Murdoch, which was published in 2008. After that book came out, there was an inquest inside Murdoch’s News Corporation into who had granted Wolff access. Fingers were pointed at Gary Ginsberg, a former Clinton Administration official who served for years as Murdoch’s political adviser, confidant, and fixer. Ginsberg subsequently lost his job, and now works at Time Warner. But, as Wolff noted in a foreword to the paperback edition of the book, Murdoch was the person primarily responsible for the access he gained. The press baron “not only was (mostly) a patient and convivial interviewee but also opened every door I asked him to open,” Wolff wrote.

If there was a similar inquest at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue about Wolff’s new book, it didn’t take long to identify a culprit. On Wednesday afternoon, the White House press office put out a statement in Trump’s name. “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency,” it said. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind . . . . Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well.” The statement goes on,“Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.”

The reason for Trump’s animus was obvious. “Fire and Fury” quotes Bannon, Trump’s former senior political adviser, as having described the June, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and a group of people connected to Russia as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” and as saying that the meeting should have been reported to the F.B.I. The book contains myriad other damning comments about Trump and his family from Bannon and other Trump advisers.

There can be no doubt that Wolff relied on Bannon heavily. The book, a copy of which I obtained from the publisher, Henry Holt, on Wednesday, starts with the rumpled former investment banker having dinner with Roger Ailes, the late head of Fox News, in early January, 2017, and ends with Bannon standing outside the headquarters of Breitbart, the conservative news organization to which he returned after being ousted from the White House, in August. In the index, Bannon’s entry is considerably longer than anybody else’s except Trump’s.

Bannon wasn’t Wolff’s only source, though. The book is based on “conversations that took place over a period of eighteen months with the president, with most members of his senior staff—some of whom talked to me dozens of times—and with many people who they in turn spoke to,” Wolff writes in the author’s note. His original idea, he says, was to write a fly-on-the-wall account of Trump’s first hundred days. “The president himself encouraged this idea. But given the many fiefdoms in the White House that came into open conflict from the first days of the administration, there seemed no one person able to make this happen. Equally, there was no one to say ‘Go away.’ Hence I became more a constant interloper than an invited guest.”

Wolff’s methods will doubtless attract more scrutiny. In some places, he re-creates entire scenes, complete with dialogue, without explicitly identifying his sources. In others, he attributes withering comments about Trump to some of his current and former aides: “For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the president was an ‘idiot.’ For Gary Cohn, he was ‘dumb as shit.’ For H.R. McMaster he was a ‘dope.’ The list went on.” On Wednesday, two people quoted in the book, Tom Barrack, a longtime friend of Trump, and Katie Walsh, a former White House aide, denied having made the negative comments about Trump that Wolff attributed to them. “We know the book has a lot of things, so far that we’ve seen, that are completely untrue,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said.

Still, the over-all portrait that Wolff draws of a dysfunctional, bitterly divided White House in the first six months of Trump’s Presidency, before the appointment of John Kelly as chief of staff and the subsequent firing of Bannon, has the whiff of authenticity about it—and it echoes news coverage at the time. Other details are impossible to confirm but damning if true. Such was the animosity between Bannon and “Jarvanka”—Bannon’s dismissive term for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner—Wolff reports, that, during one Oval Office meeting, Bannon called Ivanka “a fucking liar,” to which Trump responded,“I told you this is a tough town, baby.” Wolff also quotes Bannon commenting gleefully after Trump decided to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, a decision that Ivanka opposed: “Score. The bitch is dead.”

Equally plausible is Wolff’s portrait of Trump as a one-dimensional figure who had no conception that he could win the 2016 election; little clue what to do after he did emerge victorious from the campaign trail; and virtually no interest in, or aptitude for, acquiring the skills and information needed to fulfill the role of President. “Here was, arguably, the central issue of the Trump presidency,” Wolff writes. The Commander-in-Chief “didn’t process information in any conventional sense—or, in a way, he didn’t process it at all.” He continues,

Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really 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  . . . . Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate—total television.

But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted his own expertise—no matter how paltry or irrelevant—more than anyone else’s. What’s more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you were worthy of attention.

Confirming long-running news accounts, Wolff reports that Trump often retires in the early evening to his bedroom, where he has three television screens, and interrupts his viewing only to converse by telephone with his friends and cronies, some of them fellow-billionaires. There are revealing, unconfirmed new anecdotes, too, about Trump’s sexism and narcissism. In one meeting, Wolff says, the President referred to Hope Hicks, his communications director, as “a piece of tail.” In another meeting, he described Sally Yates, the former acting Attorney General, whom he fired early in his term, after she refused to defend his original travel ban, as “such a cunt.”

As Wolff tells it, Trump is, ultimately, a self-fixated performer rather than a politician, and his primary goal is to monopolize public attention. (“This man never takes a break from being Donald Trump,” Wolff quotes Bannon as saying.) This depiction probably understates Trump’s devotion to making money, as well as his racism and nativism, both of which go back decades. But, in any case, even performer-Presidents have to make some decisions, and Wolff devotes a good deal of space to the most fateful call Trump has made so far: the firing of the F.B.I. director James Comey, last May. Whether Trump’s firing of Comey amounts to obstruction of justice is a central focus of the investigation being conducted by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, into the President’s behavior.

In Wolff’s account, the battle lines inside the White House were clearly drawn. Bannon, Reince Priebus, who served as chief of staff before Kelly, and Donald McGahn, the White House counsel, were adamantly opposed to firing Comey. “McGahn tried to explain that in fact Comey himself was not running the Russia investigation, that without Comey the investigation would proceed anyway,” Wolff writes. In an Oval Office meeting, Bannon told Trump, “This Russian story is a third-tier story, but you fire Comey and it’ll be the biggest story in the world.”

Ranged on the other side of the issue, according to Wolff, were some of Trump’s cronies outside the White House, including Chris Christie and Rudolph Giuliani, who “encouraged him to take the view that the DOJ was resolved against him; it was all part of a holdover Obama plot.” Even more important, Wolff goes on, was the concern of Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, “channeled through his son and daughter-in-law, that the Kushner family [business] dealings were getting wrapped up in the pursuit of Trump.” As the President considered whether to get rid of Comey, Jared and Ivanka “encouraged him, arguing the once possibly charmable Comey was now a dangerous and uncontrollable player whose profit would inevitably be their loss.”

But “Fire and Fury” also stresses that the prime mover in the firing of Comey was Trump himself. In the end, the President cut almost all of his advisers out of his final decision-making process:

Jared and Ivanka were urging the president on, but even they did not know that the axe would shortly fall. Hope Hicks . . . didn’t know. Steven Bannon, however much he worried that the president might blow, didn’t know. His chief of staff didn’t know. And his press secretary didn’t know. The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue.

Eight days after Trump fired Comey, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller to take over the Russia investigation. Although the findings of Mueller’s probe aren’t yet known, and Trump’s lawyers insist that the probe will clear the President of any wrongdoing, Wolff was surely right to stress the momentousness of the decision to get rid of the “rat”— Trump’s term for Comey. Wolff recounts near the end of the book that, five months after Comey’s firing, Bannon was predicting the collapse of Trump’s Presidency. Speaking in Breitbart’s headquarters, which Bannon refers to as the Breitbart Embassy, Bannon told people there was a 33.3-per-cent chance that the Mueller investigation would lead to Trump’s impeachment, a 33.3-per-cent chance that Trump would resign, “perhaps in the wake of a threat by the cabinet to act on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment,” and a 33.3-per-cent chance that he would “limp to the end of his term. In any event, there would certainly not be a second term, or even an attempt at one. ‘He's not going to make it,’ said Bannon at the Breitbart Embassy. ‘He’s lost his stuff.’ ”

The acrimony surrounding former White House adviser Steve Bannon’s very public break with President Donald Trump is escalating, suggesting a permanent split between the president and the pugilistic strategist who helped put him in the Oval Office.

The new fissure in an already fractious Republican Party cast doubt on Bannon’s hopes to foment a movement centered on “Trumpism without Trump.”

It already has cost him a key backer. Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire GOP donor and Breitbart co-owner, issued a statement Thursday distancing her family from Bannon.

“I support President Trump and the platform upon which he was elected,” she said. “My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements.”

Trump hailed that move on Twitter Friday, saying: “The Mercer Family recently dumped the leaker known as Sloppy Steve Bannon. Smart!”

White House officials described the president as furious at Bannon’s criticisms, laid out in an explosive new book that quoted the former aide as questioning Trump’s competence and describing a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr., Trump campaign aides and a Russian lawyer as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”

On Twitter Thursday night, Trump said the book was full of “lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist.” He also came up with a new nickname for Bannon: “Sloppy Steve.”

A parade of administration officials and allies worked to discredit Bannon as a disgruntled has-been. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders went so far as to suggest that Bannon ought to be booted from Breitbart, the populist website he helps run.

“I certainly think that it’s something they should look at and consider,” she said.

Michael Wolff, author of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” spoke on NBC’s “Today Show” Friday, defending his reporting and saying the president’s efforts to halt publication have been good for sales.

Asked about Bannon’s comments in the book and in recent days, Wolff said: “The president has tried to put this, this book is about Steve Bannon. So let me say very forthrightly: This book is not about Steve Bannon. This book is about Donald Trump.”

Bannon had helped Trump form a coalition of anti-establishment Republicans, blue-collar working class and economic nationalists that launched him to the White House, but Trump had long ago grown frustrated that Bannon seemed to be overstepping his role as a staffer.

The self-appointed keeper of Trump’s nationalist flame during the president’s first six months in office, Bannon had soured on the president even before he was pushed out of the White House for feeding the perception that he was Trump’s puppeteer.

None of Bannon’s close associates was willing to speak publicly about the fallout but privately conceded that the explosive comments may forever tarnish his brand. Bannon’s political appeal had been deeply tied to the perception that he was an ally of Trump’s. Those close to Bannon feared that the connection had been permanently severed.

Bannon was preparing to launch a nonprofit organization designed to help give Trump’s brand of conservatism populism a permanent base. It’s unclear how Bannon’s new rift with the president, and the related impact on major donors, will affect the organization, dubbed Citizens of the American Republic.

Current and former White House officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, said Bannon had miscalculated by attacking the president and his family. Much of Bannon’s political clout, they argue, stemmed from the assumption that he was acting with the imprimatur of the president, even if Trump wasn’t visibly in lockstep.

Some Trump allies also expressed satisfaction that Bannon appeared to be finally cast out of the president’s inner circle.

“Bannon has no contingent,” former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday between media interviews to defend Trump. On Thursday, Gingrich echoed Trump’s charge that Bannon had “lost his mind.”

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a longtime punching bag for Bannon, reveled in the aide’s break with the president. “I’d like to associate myself with what the president had to say about Steve Bannon yesterday,” he said mischievously Thursday.

Since leaving the White House, Bannon spent much of his time courting donors to help finance his self-declared war on the Republican establishment. He vowed to find Republican challengers for virtually every GOP senator seeking election this fall, chiefly for the purpose of electing candidates who would remove McConnell as majority leader.

Bannon publicly backed conservative challengers in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Mississippi and New York, where House challenger Michael Grimm issued a statement denouncing the ex-adviser’s comments as “baseless attacks” that were “beyond disturbing.”

Others who have received boosts from Bannon, including Arizona Senate candidate Kelli Ward and potential Mississippi Senate challenger Chris McDaniel, were more circumspect, wary of alienating either faction of the party’s insurgent grassroots.

Bannon’s political standing was already weakened after he went all-out last month to support failed Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore despite multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore.

Doubling down on Moore left Bannon politically “incapacitated,” said Steven Law, president and CEO of the super PAC led by McConnell.

“The only concern left was whether the president might give Bannon a temporary lease on life,” he said. “But this repudiation was so methodical and so absolute that it really slams the door on that.”

White House aides have tried to look past other loaded comments from Bannon in recent months while seeking to marshal his political following on the president’s behalf.

But they warned Bannon’s allies over the last 24 hours that Trump would likely never take his calls again. However, there are few absolutes in Trump’s orbit, White House aides acknowledge, and he has been known to bury the hatchet with those he perceived to have wronged him.

Some Trump allies even encouraged him to welcome Bannon back into his good graces.

“You can either excise him or shun him, which I don’t think is the best recommended strategy, or tell him to knock it off and bring himself back into the fold,” Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House communications director, said on MSNBC.

Trump coolly noted Thursday that his full-throated counterassault appeared to have its desired effect on Bannon.

“He called me a great man last night,” Trump said, referring to Bannon’s radio show appearance. “He obviously changed his tune pretty quick.”

“Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” quickly shot atop Amazon’s best-seller list, and the publisher moved up its release date by four days, to Friday.