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 comments 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 ended up being released on Friday, four days ahead of its scheduled publication date.
Here are some especially notable claims from the book, in case you’re on a waitlist for your own copy.
Trump told former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes that son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner would “work out” the Russia issue.
According to Wolff, Ailes warned 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 warned Trump of potentially damaging material coming his way. “You need to take this seriously, Donald.”
“Jared has this,” said a happy Trump. “It’s all worked out.”
Kushner, who has been tasked with a rather large array of tasks as a White House senior adviser, has faced plenty of scrutiny in the multiple investigations into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia last year.
Trump has told people that the voice on the “Access Hollywood” tape isn’t his.
The book appears to corroborate previous reports that Trump has attempted to cast doubt on the authenticity of the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he bragged about sexual assault.
His explanation, in an off-the-record conversation with a friendly cable anchor, was that it “really wasn’t me.”
The anchor acknowledged how unfair it was to be characterized by a single event.
“No,” said Trump, “it wasn’t me. I’ve been told by people who understand this stuff about how easy it is to alter these things and put in voices and completely different people.”
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch said Trump was “a fucking idiot.”
When strategizing how he could reach out to Silicon Valley executives, Trump told Murdoch that he could raise the issue of increasing the number of H-1B visas, which are given to highly skilled workers.
Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas might be hard to square with his immigration promises. But Trump seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, “We’ll figure it out.”
“What a fucking idiot,” said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.
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 ― particularly his anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy proposals.
Miller, a fifty-five-year-old trapped in a thirty-two-year-old’s body, was a former Jeff Sessions staffer brought on to the Trump campaign for his political experience. Except, other than being a dedicated far-right conservative, it was unclear what particular abilities accompanied Miller’s political views. He was supposed to be a speechwriter, but if so, he seemed restricted to bullet points and unable to construct sentences. He was supposed to be a policy adviser but knew little about policy. He was supposed to be the house intellectual but was militantly unread. He was supposed to be a communications specialist, but he antagonized almost everyone. Bannon, during the transition, sent him to the Internet to learn about and to try to draft the [executive order].
Bannon said the administration’s travel ban targeting majority-Muslim countries would “crush the liberals.”
The ban, unveiled just days after Trump’s inauguration last January, caused widespread confusion among government officials and agencies, as they were largely left in the dark on its planning and implementation. Protesters stormed airports around the country.
“Why did we do this on a Friday when it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the most protesters?” almost the entire White House staff demanded to know.
“Errr … that’s why,” said Bannon. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.” That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the left.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka told her friends about the secrets of her father’s hair.
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 absolutely 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 swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, 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 consumption 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 is a “post-literate” TV junkie.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that a busy schedule and strong work ethic keeps 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, hardly reads and struggles to process information.
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. (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 gossip squibs on the New York Post’s Page Six.) Some thought 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 hated school … And he’s not going to start liking it now.”
“Everybody was a leaker”: former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, Bannon, Kushner — even Trump.
In their efforts to “influence the president and undermine” each another, Bannon, Priebus and Kushner created a kind of “paralysis” within the White House that led to each of the advisers turning to the media, Wolff writes.
The constant leaking was often blamed on lower minions and permanent executive branch staff, culminating in late February with an all-hands meeting of staffers called by Sean Spicer—cell phones surrendered at the door—during which the press secretary issued threats of random phone checks and admonitions 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.
When the president got on the phone after dinner, it was often a rambling affair. In paranoid or sadistic fashion, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short—a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington. His callers, largely because they found his conversation peculiar, alarming, or completely contrary to reason and common sense, often overrode what they might otherwise have assumed to be the confidential nature of the calls and shared the content with someone else.
Trump accusing the Obama administration of “wiretapping” Trump Tower was a “turning point” for White House staff.
In a series of tweets on March 4, 2017, Trump accused former President Barack Obamaof surveilling him, offering no evidence to support the claim. “This is McCarthyism!” Trump wrote, adding that Obama was a “Bad (or sick) guy!”
It was a turning point. Until 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 state of queasy sheepishness, if not constant incredulity.
Sean Spicer, for one, kept repeating his daily, if not hourly, mantra: “You can’t make this shit up.”
Trump had no interest in repealing Obamacare — or health care in general. A man of many phobias, however, he once lied so as not to be pegged obese.
Trump had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare. An overweight seventy-year-old man with various physical phobias (for instance, he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese), he personally found health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful subject. The details of the contested legislation were, to him, particularly boring; his attention would begin wandering from the first words of a policy discussion.
Prior to his presidency, he had likely never had a meaningful discussion in his life about health insurance. “No one in the country, or on earth, has given less thought to health insurance than Donald,” said Roger Ailes.
During one particular health care discussion, Trump reportedly asked of his aides: “Why can’t Medicare simply cover everybody?”
Privately, Kellyanne Conway rolls her eyes at Trump’s antics.
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 regarded him that way, she seemed to suggest that she might, too. She illustrated her opinion of her boss with a whole series of facial expressions: eyes rolling, mouth agape, head snapping back. But in the On position, she metamorphosed into believer, protector, defender, and handler. Conway is an antifeminist (or, actually, in a complicated ideological somersault, she sees feminists as being antifeminists), ascribing her methods and temperament to her being a wife and mother. She’s instinctive and reactive. Hence her role as the ultimate Trump defender: she verbally threw herself in front of any bullet coming his way.
Trump loved her defend-at-all-costs shtick. Conway’s appearances were on his schedule to watch live. His was often the first call she got after coming off the air. She channeled Trump: she said exactly the kind of Trump stuff that would otherwise make her put a finger-gun to her head.
White House officials have various insults for Trump.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump “a fucking moron.” According to Wolff, other officials have used similarly colorful terms to express their frustrations with the president.
Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn’t know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes. There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what. For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, he was an “idiot.” For Gary Cohn, he was “dumb as shit.” For H.R. McMaster he was a “dope.” The list went on.
Trump has multiple theories that former President Richard M. Nixon was framed for the Watergate scandal.
Trump was 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.
Trump, who saw history through personalities—people he might have liked or disliked—was a John Dean freak. He went bananas when a now gray and much aged Dean appeared on talk shows to compare the Trump-Russia investigation to Watergate. That would bring the president to instant attention and launch an inevitable talk-back monologue to the screen about loyalty and what people would do for media attention. It might also be accompanied by several revisionist theories Trump had about Watergate and how Nixon had been framed. And always there were rats. A rat was someone who would take you down for his own advantage. If you had a rat, you needed to kill it. And there were rats all around.
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 had fought repeatedly against Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s White House influence, had supported the withdrawal.
“Score,” Bannon said. “The bitch is dead.”
Bannon called Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russian operatives “treasonous,” and suggested Trump himself met with the foreign officials on the same day.
Wolff outlines four imagined scenarios justifying the meeting in Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, ranging from outright plotting 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 not aware of the meeting.
Bannon went a step further, saying, “The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero.” Slamming members of Trump’s family for taking the meeting without lawyers, Bannon said, “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.”
“But that’s the brain trust that they had,” he added. Bannon suggested the leak about the meeting had come from Kushner, in order to lay blame at the feet of Trump Jr. and deflect attention from the Kushner family.
The Russia probe is “all about money laundering,” Bannon said.
Bannon unleashed his frustration with Trump’s replies when The New York Times questioned him about Russia, mocking the president for warning special counsel Robert Mueller not to look into his family’s finances — and expecting him not to do precisely that.
“This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner … It’s as plain as a hair on your face.… It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me. But … ‘executive privilege!’” Bannon mimicked. ”‘We’ve got executive privilege!’ There’s no executive privilege! We proved that in Watergate.”
“They’re sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five,” Bannon added in part of a lengthy quotation bashing the Trump Tower meeting.
Trump’s presidency might end with impeachment, according to Bannon.
Bannon said “it just brings the impeachment closer” if Trump were to fire Mueller.
There’s a “33.3 percent chance that the Mueller investigation would lead to the impeachment of the president, a 33.3 percent chance 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.”
- This article ‘The Wildest Moments From ‘Fire And Fury,’ The Trump Book Everyone Is Talking About’
originally appeared on HuffPost.
