"Idiot" in the White House

A book with gossip about the administration of Trump provoked a scandal in Washington. What's happening?

The main theme of the American media of the last days is the book “Flame and Fury” written by journalist Michael Wolff with a detailed chronicle of Donald Trump's presidency in the White House. Wulff, who claims to have spent many months in the White House and interviewed several hundred people, describes the Trump administration as an unsystematic chaotic organization, where everyone competes with each other for influence on the president - and no one respects this president. Trump himself has already stated that the author of the book is lying, and his lawyers demanded that the publisher not put it on sale and apologize. "Medusa" talks about conflict around Wulff's book.

What kind of book? Who wrote it?

“Flame and rage. Inside the White House at Trump ”is a new book by Michael Wolff. The 64-year-old New York journalist, who has been collaborating with publications like New York Times, New York, The Guardian and The Hollywood Reporter, the author of several books, Wulff is known as a person who writes about rich people and media business; In particular, in 2008, he released the biography of Rupert Murdok . Being entering the world of social New York, Wulff was long familiar with Donald Trump-for example, he appeared in the pilot issue of the Trump Girls TV show about how the participants in the beauty contest are trying to become real estate agents (as a result, the transfer was not aired).

In June 2016, when Trump became a candidate for US President from the Republican Party, Wolff made an interview with him for The Hollywood Reporter; Trump, judging by the reaction of his press secretary, was pleased with him. As Wulff himself says in the column for the same The Hollywood Reporter, when Trump won the presidential election, he invited him to write a book about his presidency. This idea did not seem interesting to Trump, but he did not forbid the journalist to work.

Thanks to this, he says , he managed to get a permanent pass to the White House, despite the lack of any official status, and Wolff sat on the sofa in one of the rooms of the president’s headquarters for several months, talking with everyone who passed him (and at least once with Trump himself). According to Wulff, working on Flame and Fury, he spent more than two hundred interviews. The journalist also claims that the general unsystematic administration was also reflected on how its employees talked with reporters: for example, at first they told something strictly not under the record, and soon after that-officially and under their own name. The result was a detailed - and consciously contradictory - chronicle of the first year of Trump's presidency.

What is so explosive in it?

Of those fragments of “Flame and Fury” that were published by January 5 (the largest of them in the New York magazine), for example, turns out the following:

• Donald Trump and his team were not going to win the presidential election - and were shocked when it turned out that Trump won. None of them understood how to rule the country, and seriously did not think about how to do it.
• Trump's advisers, subordinates and friends of Trump do not respect the president; Many of them in the book directly call him a “fool”, “idiot” and “moron”. Wulff cites several episodes in which Trump really looks incompetent: for example, his former adviser Sam Nanberg claims that when he tried to explain the US Constitution to explain the boss, he stopped listening after the fourth amendment. In another scene, Trump is advised to appoint John Boner, the head of the administration of the former speaker, and Trump does not understand who we are talking about.
• The administration of Trump, in fact, did not have a structure: the formal head of the Rains Subus administration, the presidential adviser to Steve Bannon, the daughter of Trump Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner - all of them had direct access to the president and all gave further orders, which often contradicted each other. At first, Bannon believed that it was he who controls America and is developing the main strategy of Trump's presidency.
• Trump himself often became a source of leaks from the administration: the president spoke for several hours on the phone with friends and acquaintances and shared news and emotions with them (for example, he called up daily with the same rupert, which, after one of the conversations, picked the phone, called Trump a “fucking idiot”). Many of the president’s interlocutors had no reason to keep secret that they recognized.
• Steve Bannon, who worked in the administration until August 2017, calls in the book a meeting of Kushner with Russian lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya “treacherous” and “non -poatriotic”. He claims that Kushner did not have enough mind to hold a meeting outside the Trump’s office and in the presence of lawyers, as well as that Trump himself had to keep abreast of negotiations on the possible transfer of incriminating evidence to Hillary Clinton.
• Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump allegedly already plan that Trump's daughter herself will try to become president at some point.
• Wulff hints that Trump has health problems: for example, claims that the president is inclined to repeat the same stories in one conversation several times in half an hour.

Can this be believed?

It is completely unclear. In published fragments there are few links to specific sources - more often Wolff describes the situations and dialogs from a third party, as if he had observed them. For several decades, a journalist has repeatedly been reproached for his careers for incorrectly interpreting what they say - however, they never sued the journalist. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who owns the most ambiguous quotes in accessible fragments of the book, did not try to refute the words attributed to him. The former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, Jennis Min, claims to be attended by a conversation described in the book between Bannon and the former head of the Fox News Channel Roger Ails, and that everything was exactly as Wulff claims. (In one of the quotes in the book, Bannon compares modern China with "Nazi Germany, as it was in 1929-1930.")

However, there are people who deny that the words given in the book said, or that the situations described by Wolff took place. So, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he never spoke to Kushner that British intelligence could spy on Trump’s presidential campaign: according to him, he never had talks about anything like that; "This is a complete fake from beginning to end." Former deputy head of the administration of Trump Katie Walsh told the journalist Yahoo News that she did not compare Trump with the child in a conversation with Wolff. The wife of President Melania Trump through a press secretary said she was not at all upset when Trump won the election. Representatives of the two advisers of Trump and the press secretary of the US Minister of Finance also said that officials did not say the words he attributed.

In addition, the story of Trump and the constitution is told by a person who had previously boasted before journalists by making up the news, and the story about the fact that Trump did not know who Boer was, he looked doubtful if only because the men were well known and the episode described in the book played together in golf.

However, Wolff in the preface in the book himself admits that it was often difficult for him to distinguish the truth from fiction: some of his interlocutors said things that were directly contrary to what others said; Many just lied. The author of Flame and Rage claims that in some cases he left in the text several conflicting explanations of what was happening with each other so that the reader himself decides which of them is more reliable - and in other places describes the events as they, in his own opinion, occurred.

What is the dissatisfied with Trump?

All. To begin with - Bannon's words: January 3, when the first fragments from Wulff appeared, the White House published a statement by the president. In it, Trump reports that Bannon “has nothing to do with me and my presidency” that his influence on Trump’s victory in the elections was minimal and that when Bennon was fired, he “not only lost his job, but also lost his mind.”

January 5, when the noise around the book grew, Trump spoke about her on Twitter. He said that the author of the Fake Book did not have any access to the White House and that he himself never talked with Wolff for the book. According to the president, the book is “full of lies and non -existent sources”. “Pay attention to the past of this guy [Wolff] and observe what will happen to him and with the trouble -free Steve [Bannon],” the US president wrote.

Meanwhile, his lawyers on January 4 tried to suspend the release of Wulff’s book, threatening in a 11-page official letter to the publishing house by court lawsuits with accusations of slander and demanding apology from publishers. The letter was signed by Charles Harder - a lawyer who previously represented Hulk Hogan in the process against the Gawker website, who eventually led to the bankruptcy of the publication (financed Hogan a billionaire and supporter of Trump Peter Til). In addition, Harder until recently represented the interests of Harvey Weinstein, accused of sexual violence of the Hollywood producer: it was he who threatened the New York Times by the court after the publication of the investigation of Weinstein’s actions, but did not file any claims.

The publishing house of Henry Holt and Co., in which the Flame and Fury is published, responded to the requirements of lawyers with a statement that the book would go on sale not on January 9, as planned, but on January 5th. The last few days, Flame and Fury has stably occupying the first place in the list of Amazon bestsellers.

Alexander Gorbachev