WaPo "Among the many things he’s been called — “blunt,” “pathetic,” “calculating” — the one thing Michael Wolff has never been described as is boring.
"A provocateur and media polemicist, Wolff has a penchant for stirring up an argument and pushing the facts as far as they’ll go, and sometimes further than they can tolerate, according to his critics. He has been accused of not just re-creating scenes in his books and columns, but of creating them wholesale.
"That’s some context for Wolff’s most explosive bit of reporting to date: A scathing new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” describing dysfunction and infighting in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the first year of his presidency, replete with damning criticism of Trump from within his inner circle.
"According to an unauthorized report in the Guardian newspaper and a lengthy excerpt in New York magazine, Wolff portrays Trump and his closest aides as astonished by his electoral victory in 2016, and wholly unprepared for office. Trump, he reports, had no idea who former House speaker John A. Boehner was when Roger Ailes, a campaign adviser, recommended him as chief of staff. Top advisers and allies doubted the president’s intelligence and openly mocked him.
"But Wolff’s sharpest revelations concern comments attributed to Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman and former White House chief strategist. In on-the-record interviews with Wolff, Bannon called a meeting between the Trump campaign’s top advisers and Russian representatives in mid-2016 “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” — furthering the narrative of Trump’s harshest critics." . . .
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