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Fire and Fury summary: All the most explosive moments in new book from inside Trump's White House
Michael Wolff's explosive book from inside the workings of the Trump White House has finally become public, sending shockwaves around the world.
The book – which has already been criticised by both Trump himself as well as critics – contains a range of huge claims about the president and those who surround him.
Extracts from Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House had already made headlines around the world. But people are finally getting their hands on their own copies of the book, rather than excerpted details from the expose.
That's because the book's publication schedule was pushed forward by publisher Little, Brown because of "unprecedented demand". The book is now available in bookshops, as well as on Amazon, where it appears to have already sold out.
Here's our full summary – assembled live during the read through – of the experience of reading the explosive book.
The book starts with an author's note. That might normally be the kind of thing you skip over, but it offers some insight into the bizarre process through which this book was born.
It was originally intended as an account of Trump's first 100 days, says Wolff. But then so much kept happening into the second hundred and more that further work was required, so the book got longer.
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The events described come from eighteen months of conversations with Trump and those around him, some of whom talked dozens of times. The work started long before Trump even imagined himself in the White House, says Wolff, with a conversation at the candidate's house in Beverly Hills – all conducted while he ate a pint of Haagen-Dazs ice cream.
In all, the book takes in more than 200 interviews. But more than that, Wolff claims to have taken up a "semipermanent seat on a couch in the West Wing", becoming a fly-on-the-wall among the chaos of the White House. That chaos meant there was nobody with enough power to tell him to go away, he claims – and so he stayed. The book is what ensued (or so he claims).
Into the prologue – and it's not Trump we're hearing about, but his two friends and more or less close advisers Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes. They met for dinner – a dinner to which Bannon was late, and reportedly said he doesn't drink, just like Trump – a couple of weeks before the new president was inaugurated, writes Wolff, and both were in a strange state of shock about the fact they'd won. Already, it's the strange details that stand out more than the politics: Bannon was wearing two shirts, military fatigues and turned up late; and the now disgraced but then Fox News-leading Roger Ailes held forth with strange views of why Trump had won.
It's clear that everyone around Trump was more or less convinced that even he didn't know why he would won, or what he would be doing as president. Ailes was forced to ask Bannon whether Trump "gets it". Bannon said that he did – but Wolff describes a pause before doing so that perhaps lasted a little too long.
We're coming to our first – of many, no doubt – looks at what happened with the Russians. Roger Ailes asks Steve Bannon what Trump "has gotten himself into" with the country. Bannon says that he had gone to Russia with the hope of meeting Putin. Putin wasn't interested, though, Wolff reports Bannon as saying – so he has been forced to keep trying to become friends.
Into election day. And we start with a reminder that nobody actually thought Trump would win: his close adviser Kellyanne Conway, for instance, is reported to have spent all day ringing around the many TV producers she'd befriended selling herself and casting off blame for the inevitable defeat she was about to suffer. She blamed the Republican party, first, then moved on.
Secondly, she had attempted to show how she had done a surprisingly good job – by managing to at least bring someone seen as the worst candidate in history within a chance of winning.
The agreement wasn't just that Trump wouldn't win but that he shouldn't win, writes Wolff. It was helpful that enough people didn't think it would happen to actually have to deal with the fallout if it did.
Even Trump wasn't clear about the fact that he actually wanted to be president, according to the book. He was already looking forward to his plans for a Trump TV network and other ventures. And he was getting ready to claim that the election had been stolen from him, and that's why he would lose.
Trump believed that everyone around him was an idiot and that his own campaign was "crappy". He also thought that the Clinton campaign had all the "best" people, Wolff claims.
He was so unsure of his own campaign that he even refused to donate money to it, Wolff reports. He billed himself as a billionaire throughout the campaign, but the best he could do was lend $10 million on the promise that he'd get it back when they raised more money, and the finance chairman Steve Mnuchin had to collect the loan to ensure Trump didn't forget.
Indeed, the only person who believed Trump would win was Steve Bannon. But since people thought he was "crazy Steve", that did the opposite of reassuring them, says Wolff.
Wolff moves on to discussing Trump's marriage to Melania, something that was "perplexing to almost everybody around him". They could go for days without talking, even if they were both in Trump tower. She might not even know which house he was in, and didn't seem to care. And she wasn't very interested in his business, either.
But he still talked about her a lot, and it's not wrong to call their relationship a marriage in name only, claims Wolff. He would discuss and admire her looks, even when other people were there, and he bragged sincerely about the fact that she was a "trophy wife". And he wanted her approval, including for his bid for president.
She gave it, even though she was one of the few people who thought he might actually win. That was a terrifying thought for her she didn't want to lose her "carefully sheltered life", which kept her not only from the glare of the press but from the rest of the extended Trump family, and allowed her to focus on raising her son Barron.
The Billy Bush tape – in which Trump boasted about "grabbing [women] by the pussy" – was an embarrassment for Melania Trump, too. The silver lining was that at least her husband wouldn't become president, jokes Wolff, and idea that even Trump himself encouraged to her when she was upset about his run.
The picture the book paints of Trump Tower on election night is a fairly desperate and depressing one – but only when it became clear that Trump was going to win. The whole campaign was set up so that it would win by losing: they would avoid the potentially dangerous glare of the press that would come with a victory, and all of the big people in the movement had already set up their new jobs for afterwards. Trump, for instance, would be able to become the figurehead of a movement that would see him as the martyr of the crooked Clinton campaign.
When it became clear he was going to win, however, everything changed. Donald Jr looked "as if he had seen a ghost"; Melania "was in tears – and not of joy"; and Trump went from "befuddled" to "disbelieving" to "quite horrified", all in the space of an hour. And then he underwent the most dramatic change of all: into a "a man who believed that he deserved to be and was wholly capable of being the president of the United States".
Wolff moves on to Trump's character before he started thinking about running for president. And character is the right word: Wolff says that he speaks about himself in the third person, and was living life as a role in the same way Hulk Hogan does.
The book moves on to discuss rumours – apparently supported by people who knew him – that Trump had sex with his friends' wives. But is that true? All that and more is addressed in this excellent piece by Adam Lusher, which looks at just how much of this book we can trust in.
(Just jumping out of the book here to say that if you want to heckle me, hurry me along, ask any questions or whatever else, then the best place to do it is probably on Twitter – where I'm @_andrew_griffin.)
During the transition, Trump kept asking to have his family join the team. "In defiance of law and tone, and everybody's disbelieving looks, the president seemed intent on surrounding himself in the White House with his family." All of the Trumps would come, apart from Melania, he said, and would take on roles similar to those they had in the Trump Organization.
Nobody was there to stop him. That is, until famous Trump supporter and media personality Ann Coulter took him aside and said: "Nobody is apparently telling you this. But you can't. You just can't hire your children," Wolff writes.
But he continued to insist that he was able to call on his family's help. Eventually, he relented on his desire to have Jared Kushner as his chief-of-staff, but as we know many of the extended family of Trumps continue to occupy important places in the White House.
Donald Trump has claimed that the Billy Bush tape – a video that he appeared to initially recognise the legitimacy of – might actually be fake, according to both Wolff and numerous reports before the book came out too. He has suggested that the tape "really wasn't me", and when pressed whether he meant that it was unfair to judge him on a singular event, made clear that he meant that:
No, 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.
Wolff doesn't name the friendly cable anchor that he claims Trump made those remarks too. But it is entirely in line with what he has been saying elsewhere – something that led Access Hollywood to address the claims on air, during a segment where hosts made clear that they believed the tape was real and that the president had actually already apologised for the behaviour on it.
We're hearing a lot about the explosive claims made in the book, and I'm trying to focus on those mostly here. But it's worth noting that it's definitely worth reading even if you've picked up all the good stuff in excerpts and readings like this one (and whether or not you believe them): alongside all that, it's simply a very good telling of a story that we all know something about, but perhaps haven't stepped back and thought about.
Wolff, for instance, just related the story of the then President-elect's bizarre press conference at Trump Tower, during which he surrounded himself with piles of (potentially empty) binders that would clear up his business ventures and proceeded to rattle on about the dossier that claimed he had engaged in lewd behaviour while in Russia. There's nothing in there that hasn't come from other reports, and which you probably don't already know – but it seems like so long ago, and it's sometimes easy to forget just how recently some very bizarre stuff has been going on.
A number of people point out that Melania wasn't into raising (Steve) Bannon, as I said earlier, but raising Barron (Trump). At least as far as we know. The book is explosive, yes, but hasn't suggested that Donald Trump is Steve Bannon's father, at least not yet. Apologies.
Trump didn't like his own inauguration, writes Wolff. His friend Tom Barrack raised some money to pay for a big spectacular, but he did so with the aim of creating a show that didn't really suit the new president's tastes: he was aiming for "soft sensuality" and "poetic cadence", the book claims, which isn't really an aesthetic associated with Trump.
He wanted his friends to use their influence and encourage some big stars to attend the event, or at least attack them for snubbing it. But they wouldn't, and he got upset because it seemed like they wanted to embarrass him.
So instead we got the vision we now remember: a concert at which Trump was the biggest act, something that he claimed was fine because he could "outdraw any star". That evening was a bit of a squib, if you recall – something that Wolff claims was very upsetting to the president.
But that turned out to be actually quite helpful when the inauguration ceremony came around. Steve Bannon wrote him a very aggressive, very grumpy speech – and Trump's feeling of personally being shunned and unloved meant that he delivered it with conviction.
Putting on my critical hat for a moment: there's a lot of Bannon in this book. It's clear that Wolff has been talking to him, or at least hearing a lot from him. Events are explained through that lens, often – and the story is often as much about how the Breitbart honcho responded to or guided events as the president himself. That's not necessarily a problem, but it's something that inevitably colours some of the other, more spectacular, reports.
Another useful reminder, not of new information but of a story that it's easy to forget. Remember when, in his first act after becoming president, Trump headed to the CIA to try and make friends with them but ended up throwing away his prepared remarks and talking about his intellect? Wolff quotes the remarks, referring to them as "some of the most peculiar remarks ever delivered by an American president":
I know a lot about West Point, I'm a person who very strongly believes in academics. Every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many ways academically – he was an academic genius – and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I'm like a smart person.
...
You know when I was young. Of course I feel young – I feel like I was 30... 35... 39... Somebody said, Are you young? I said, I think I'm young. I was stopping in the final months of the campaign, four stops, five stops, seven stops – speeches, speeches in front of twenty-five, thirty thousand people... fifteen, nineteen thousand. I feel young – I think we're all so young. When I was young we were always winning things in this country. We'd win with trade, we'd win with wars – at a certain age I remembering hearing from one of my instructors, the United States has never lost a war. And then, after that, it's like we haven't won anything. You know the old expression, to the victor belongs the spoils. You remember I always say, keep the oil.
"Who should keep the oil?", Wolff reports a bewildered CIA employee saying at the back of the room.
Wolff goes on to quote yet more of the strange remarks he made on that day. Our contemporary report can be read here, where you'll find yet more of his strange remarks. As ever, there's something in just reading this stuff written down; sometimes, it can feel well-delivered, but when it's written down in a long book, as it is here, it's utterly bewildering.
The full remarks from that day can be found on the White House website, here. The above might not even be the best bit.
Who is Steve Bannon? Wolff keeps asking in various ways. And the answer – the same one that so many other people have found – is: nobody really knows. He claims to have links to Hollywood, but nobody can really trace those in any meaningful ways; while he was there, he seems to have acquired a big stake in Seinfeld and gone to some important meetings, but nobody involved in them can remember him. He was involved in Biosphere 2, a major failed project that now ranks among the worst ideas in the world, stepping in as it fell apart and continued to fall apart even more. Then he got involved in raising finance for an online game, and it's not clear what he did there, either.
The book is very pre-occupied with Bannon's thinking – indeed, so far, it's not actually talked about Trump's politics, and gives Bannon credit for whatever policies or ideas he discusses. But it runs into the same problem as anyone else: nobody is clear who he is, where he came from, or quite how he managed to be one of the only important people to see Trump's success coming, and make the most of it – at least for a while.
Just as a preview of what's to come, I had a flick through the index for some of the stranger and more intriguing stuff mentioned there. Here's what we've got coming up (in, remember, a biography of the president of the United States):
- Chopra, Deepak
- Gamergate
- Gawker
- Mensch, Louise
- Mighty Ducks, The (TV show)
- Ms Universe contest
- Nazi Germany
- North Korea
- Seinfeld
- Spy Magazine
- nightly phone calls
- Wall Street 2
- World Wrestling Entertainment
Notably, Kim Jong-un only appears once in the index. (Bannon, obviously, appears loads.)
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