Please read this piece only if you like “saucy truths” -TW
“Fire and Fury: The Trump White House” describes chaos in the Trump administration, talks of treason, says president never intended to win.
By Beth Dalbey (White House Patch)
WASHINGTON, DC — Michael Wolff’s explosive new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” is filled with juicy one-liners destined to be repeated on internet memes — first daughter Ivanka Trump is described “as dumb as a rock,” for example — but it also paints a disturbing picture of dysfunction and chaos in the White House that support some of the most searing criticism of President Trump after nearly a year in office.
Wolff’s book relies heavily on interviews with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, with whom Trump is furious. The White House has dismissed the book as “trashy tabloid fiction,” and Trump said on Twitter Thursday that it is full of “lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist.”
Wolff has defended his reporting, saying that he relied not only on interviews with Bannon, but also with many others.
“Fire and Fury” went on sale Friday. Here are five of the most damning excerpts from the book:
Bannon describes a June 2016 meeting between Trump family members, campaign aides and a Russian lawyer as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” Special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian meddling in the presidential election, has focused on a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower involving a Russian lawyer, the now president’s son Donald Trump Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who has since been indicted on charges of conspiracy against the United States. Of that meeting, Wolff quotes Bannon:
“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.” He added: “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 also said, “The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero.”
Trump never planned on winning, and key campaign advisers didn’t think he should. Wolff claims in the book that Trump was simply using it as a branding exercise and launchpad for his own television network — advice he had gotten from longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News.
Wolff writes: “Even though the numbers in a few key states had appeared to be changing to Trump’s advantage, neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — the effective head of the campaign — wavered in their certainty: Their unexpected adventure would soon be over. Not only would Trump not be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be.
“Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears — and not of joy.
“There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump.”
Trump didn’t have a clue how to govern, or an interest in acquiring the skills necessary to be commander-in-chief.”Nothing contributed to the chaos and dysfunction of the White House as much as Trump’s own behavior,” Wolff wrote. “The big deal of being president was just not apparent to him. Most victorious candidates, arriving in the White House from ordinary political life, could not help but be reminded of their transformed circumstances by their sudden elevation to a mansion with palacelike servants and security, a plane at constant readiness, and downstairs a retinue of courtiers and advisers. But this wasn’t that different from Trump’s former life in Trump Tower, which was actually more commodious and to his taste than the White House.”
Trump doesn’t have the cognitive skills to process information. “Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate. He trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said [former deputy chief of staff Katie] Walsh, ‘like trying to figure out what a child wants.’ “
The book paints an unflattering picture of Trump’s regard for women. The book suggests that the 2005 “pussy-grabbing” tape leaked during the homestretch of the presidential campaign wasn’t a one-off. The president also has been accused of sexual misconduct by 19 women, and Wolff’s portrait suggests some merit to those allegations. He writes that “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,” Wolff wrote, “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.”
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