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Fire and Fury; Inside the White House – the book raising questions about Trump’s personality

A book released by Journalist and White House reporter, Micheal Wolff, is topping Amazon’s best selling charts before its release date as it is turning out to be a telltale of the most controversial President in American history; Donald Trump.

Just like the personality written about, the book has become controversial, with many White House officials refuting the claims in the book as “trashy tabloid fiction”.

Nonetheless, Wolff in an interview with NBC’s Today show said White House staff describes Trump’s persona as that of an “infant”.

“And what they mean by that is he has a need for immediate gratification, it is all about him.

“I will tell you the one description that everyone gave, everyone has in common. They all say he is like a child”.

Meanwhile, one of the correspondents of the book and former Chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, is facing fire from Trump for his comments in the book.

Bannon was quoted as saying

“the three senior guys (Donald Trump Jr.; Jared Kushner, his brother-in-law; and Paul Manafort, the then campaign chairman) 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. 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 F.B.I. immediately”, in reference to the involvement of the incrimination information on Hillary Clinton during the election.

In response, Trump criticized Bannon, referring to him as a self-promoting exaggerator who had “very little to do with our historic victory” in the 2016 presidential election and was “only in it for himself”, rather than representing Trump’s hard-core political base or supporting his agenda to “make America great again,” Bannon was “simply seeking to burn it all down”.

Although the duo (Trump and Bannon) had kept a cordial relationship after the latter was sacked from the White House in August 2017, the relationship seems to be at its brink, “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind”.

The Author

Micheal Wolff, aged 64, is an American author, essayist, and journalist, and a regular columnist and contributor to USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and the UK edition of GQ.

He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate (1998) about his own dot.com company, and The Man Who Owns the News (2008), a biography of former CEO and Executive Co-Chairman of 21st Century, Rupert Murdoch.

He also co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek.

With many describing his style of writing as controversial and unconventional, Writer Michelle Cottle said, “Even Wolff acknowledges that conventional reporting isn’t his bag, rather, he absorbs the atmosphere and gossip swirling around him at cocktail parties, on the street, and especially during those long lunches”.

Wolff was referred to as the “IT boy of New York media” in a 2004 profile in The New Republic.

The Book

The Author alleges he was able to take up “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing” after he interviewed Trump in June 2016, a position believed by some to have been facilitated by Bannon.

He said Trump had encouraged the idea himself, “Trump seemed to say, knock yourself out”, a claim the President has refuted.

The book presents Trump as an ill-informed and thoroughly unserious candidate and President, who engages mainly in satisfying his own ego and presiding over a dysfunctional White House. It gives account of an aide, Sam Nunberg, sent to explain the constitution to the candidate during the early campaign period.

“I got as far as the Fourth Amendment, before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head”.

The book refers to an email from an unnamed White House aide offering a harsh assessment of Trump’s operation said to reflect the view of Gary D. Cohn, the President’s National economics Adviser:

“It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored”.

It also asserts that Mr Cohn and other advisers and associates of Trump mock him in private, calling him an “idiot,” a “dope” or “dumb” as dirt. Thomas J. Barrack, a friend and adviser to Trump, was quoted telling a friend that the President is “not only crazy, he’s stupid.”

Responding via telephone on Wednesday, Barrack denied the accounts, referring to it as “totally false,” while adding that, “It’s clear to anyone who knows me that those aren’t my words and inconsistent with anything I’ve ever said”.  He also said Wolff never ran that quotation by him to confirm its accuracy.

Disputed claims in the Book

1) A passage of the book recounts how Roger Ailes recommended former House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to serve as Trump’s Chief of Staff. Trump’s response, according to Wolff: “Who’s that?”.

Records, however, show that Trump had golfed with Boehner in 2013, mentioning him several times on the 2016 campaign trail at least four times: April 10, 2016; Nov. 30, 2015; Oct. 14, 2015; and Sept. 25, 2015. He also tweeted about him on Oct. 8, 2015, and Sept. 25, 2015 — that last date being when Boehner resigned as speaker during the 2016 campaign.

2) A former Ted Cruz sponsor and Breitbart investor, billionaire Robert Mercer offers Trump’s campaign $5 million, and Trump is clueless as to why Mercer would invest in him. “This thing,” Trump reportedly told Mercer of his campaign “is so f—ed up”.

3) The book claims British Prime Minister Tony Blair told Jared Kushner that UK was keeping US  under surveillance during the elections. Refuting the claims, Blair told the BBC’s Today programme on Thursday that he did meet Kushner, the U.S. President’s son-in-law, but the meetings were “to discuss the Middle East peace process”. Blair denied he had been “angling for a job,” which the book is said to describe as a post-election Middle East adviser role. He said he hadn’t sought one and had not been offered one.

4) According to the writer, “100% of the people” in Trump’s camp are sceptical of his mental capacity to lead, with the book alleging that Trump failed to recognize close friends, and was prone to repeating comments.

5) Other bold claims made in the book include a deal hatched by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, for Ivanka to one day run for President, Ivanka making fun of her father’s “comb-over” in private, Rupert Murdoch calling Trump a “f—ing idiot,” and Trump and his wife, Melania, not actually wanting to win the Presidency and basically being disappointed and Melania crying afterwards was not out of joy.

In the words of Jon Sopel, BBC North America editor, “still, even if only half of what the book contains is true, it paints a damning portrait of a paranoid president and a chaotic White House”.

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