Staff ReporterThe author of a new tell-all on the White House said Saturday that his book will ‘end’ the presidency of the former real estate mogul.
Speaking with BBC radio, Michael Wolff said that his work has had “a very clear emperor-has-no-clothes effect.”
“Suddenly everywhere people are going ‘oh my God, it’s true, he has no clothes.’ That’s the background to the perception and the understanding that will finally end… this presidency.”
He added that his story “seems to present this presidency in such a way that it says he can’t do his job.”
Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” published Friday, paints Trump as a leader who doesn’t understand the weight of the presidency and spends his evenings eating cheeseburgers in bed, watching television and talking on the phone to old friends.
The book claims that for “Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the president was an ‘idiot.’ For Gary Cohn, he was ‘dumb as shit.’ For H.R. McMaster, he was a ‘dope.’ The list went on” referring to Trump’s Treasury Secretary, former chief-of-staff, economic adviser and national security adviser respectively.
The story extensively quotes US President Donald Trump’s former ally and chief strategist Stephen Bannon, who accuses Trump’s eldest son Don Jr of “treasonous” contacts with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, and characterizes the president’s daughter Ivanka as “dumb as a brick.”
Trump called the book “untruthful” and “full of lies in a series of tweets over the past few days.
“Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book,” Trump tweeted late Friday evening local time.
The president also claimed that Bannon “cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!”
Trump tweeted Friday that he gave Wolff “Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book.”
But in a Friday interview with NBC’s “Today” show, Wolff insisted that he “absolutely spoke to the president. Whether he realized it was an interview or not. I don’t know, but it certainly was not off the record.”
The book quickly sold out in shops in the US capital, with some even lining up at midnight to get their hands on it and others circulating pirated copies.
