Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

by Michael Wolff

Overview

#1 New York Times Bestseller

With extraordinary access to the West Wing, Michael Wolff reveals what happened behind-the-scenes in the first nine months of the most controversial presidency of our time in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

Since Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, the country—and the world—has witnessed a stormy, outrageous, and absolutely mesmerizing presidential term that reflects the volatility and fierceness of the man elected Commander-in-Chief.

This riveting and explosive account of Trump’s administration provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office, including:
— What President Trump’s staff really thinks of him
— What inspired Trump to claim he was wire-tapped by President Obama
— Why FBI director James Comey was really fired
— Why chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner couldn’t be in the same room
— Who is really directing the Trump administration’s strategy in the wake of Bannon’s firing
— What the secret to communicating with Trump is
— What the Trump administration has in common with the movie The Producers

Never before in history has a presidency so divided the American people. Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.

“Essential reading.”—Michael D’Antonio, author of Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success, CNN.com

“Not since Harry Potter has a new book caught fire in this way…[Fire and Fury] is indeed a significant achievement, which deserves much of the attention it has received.”—The Economist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250301468
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	01/08/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	371,884
Product dimensions:	5.46(w) x 8.24(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

Michael Wolff has received numerous awards for his work, including two National Magazine Awards. He has been a regular columnist for Vanity Fair, New York, The Hollywood Reporter, British GQ, USA Today, and The Guardian. He is the author of several books, including the bestselling Burn Rate and The Man Who Owns the News. He lives in Manhattan and has four children.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS


Author’s Note xv

Prologue: Ailes and Bannon 1
1. Election Day 9
2. Trump Tower 19
3. Day One 40
4. Bannon 52
5. Jarvanka 66
6. At Home 83
7. Russia 94
8. Org Chart 108
9. CPAC 126
10. Goldman 140
11. Wiretap 150
12. Repeal and Replace 161
13. Bannon Agonistes 173
14. Situation Room 183
15. Media 195
16. Comey 210
17. Abroad and at Home 222
18. Bannon Redux 235
19. Mika Who? 247
20. McMaster and Scaramucci 263
21. Bannon and Scaramucci 275
22. General Kelly 287
Epilogue: Bannon And Trump 301
Afterword to the Paperback Edition 311

Acknowledgments 317
Index 319

Editorial Reviews

#1 New York Times Bestseller

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, The Sunday Times, The Observer, and Financial Times

"What makes Fire and Fury important is that it is not just about Trump, but a product of the same culture that produced Trump: It is 'reality' journalism, in the same way that Trump is a 'reality' character." —The Atlantic

"It is not a book. It is the book. If there is only one book Washington political reporters will read this year...then this is it.... [Wolff] is a wicked stylist and keen observer, with a justly earned reputation for approaching his subjects with fangs bared and talons sharpened.... A perfect karmic delivery system."—The Weekly Standard

"The pages of Wolff’s book are littered with insults and intrigue, backstabbing and dysfunction."—The Washington Post

"To the many ironies of Donald Trump’s presidency can be added the fact that a man who does not read books has helped cause a publishing sensation.... Mr Wolff’s muckraking skills, cattiness, cynicism and feel for human weakness, especially among the rich and famous, make him well-qualified for the job."—The Economist

"An undeniably juicy chronicle of a presidential administration that in just one year has been beset by numerous scandals and crises.... [Wolff] gives the reader a you-are-there sense of events without resorting to an unneeded dramatic writing style." —The San Francisco Chronicle


"Wolff’s lasting achievement here is not his headline-grabbing revelations but the skillful, enthralling, and utterly terrifying way he depicts the unqualified, unprepared, and downright unusual characters to be found wandering the halls of the White House in the first half of 2017 as well as their near bloodsport-level conflicts." —Entertainment Weekly

"What makes the book significant is its sly, hilarious portrait of a hollow man, into the black hole of whose needy, greedy ego the whole world has virtually vanished."—The Guardian

"The White House has naturally denied and decried Wolff's account, but even if it's only halfway accurate, it presents an appalling view of a frighteningly unqualified and unprepared gang that can't think straight."—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

01/15/2018
Wolff (Television is the New Television) presents an insider's look at the extreme dysfunction of the Trump administration in this searing real-life page-turner, based on hundreds of conversations conducted over 18 months, including with most of Trump's senior staff. He starts by showing how the seeds for chaotic governance were sown in the election campaign, which almost no one close to Trump thought would succeed. (His wife, Melania, was one of the few exceptions.) Wolff then walks the reader through the tumult of the first eight months of Trump's presidency, including the rambling speech to CIA staffers in which the president said that the U.S. should have "kept" Iraq's oil; the casual approach to enacting a travel ban on immigrants from majority-Muslim countries; the firings of Michael Flynn and James Comey; and the exodus of key officials, including advisor Steve Bannon. Wolff peppers his narrative with devastating assessments of the president from those with close access to him: Former White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh stated that trying to understand Trump was "like trying to figure out what a child wants." And longtime Trump political aide Sam Nunberg remarked, "Is Trump a good person, an intelligent person, a capable person? I don't even know." While Wolff's use of anonymous "deep background" sources may give readers reservations about the accuracy of every detail, this explosive account will undoubtedly remain a topic of conversation for the near future. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

If you think that bomb cyclones are unique to the weather, then listening to this audiobook will change your mind. This literary perfect storm combines a book the president wants to ban with a narrator, Holter Graham, whose energy and vocal clarity add fuel to the author’s incendiary words. It would be easy to say that Graham could become one of the most listened-to voices in the nation simply because he’s reading this explosive audiobook, but that wouldn’t be fair to him. He uses his deep, elastic voice to punctuate key ideas, and he speeds up and slows down to create tension. Graham even uses character voices, though not impersonations, to convey emotions. The result is a wonderful performance of a most important audiobook. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2018 - AudioFile

2018-01-05
Headline-grabbing fly-on-the-wall view of the dysfunctional playroom that is the Trump White House."What is this ‘white trash'?" asks a fashion model of Donald Trump. He replies, "They're people just like me, only they're poor." There's a certain Snopes-comes-to-the-big-city feel to celebrity journalist Wolff's (Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age, 2015, etc.) tawdry portrait of the current occupants of the White House, which, writes the author, is based on conversations with the president and his senior staff and backed by hundreds of hours of recordings. Given the many competing fiefdoms in the West Wing, Wolff adds, no one wholly endorsed his access ("the president himself encouraged this idea," he says), but no one quite said no, either. The results are damning, those competing fiefdoms not just jealous of their turf, but also vicious in their characterizations of the other side. Most aggressively nasty, by the author's account, is former assistant Steve Bannon, who describes Trump as "a simple machine" with a binary of flattery and calumny, while he declares that "I am the leader of the national-populist movement" and suggests that Trumpism can do fine without its namesake—who, he adds, will not be around for a second term. Wolff has plenty of sting himself. Of one-time intern-turned-power broker Stephen Miller, he sneers, "he was supposed to be the house intellectual but was militantly unread," while he suggests that the dumb-as-a-brick (Bannon's characterization) Ivanka's relationship with her father is purely transactional: "It was business. Building the brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House—it was all business." No one in the administration seems up to the job he or she is supposed to be doing, and there's an ugly, startling instance of incompetence on every page.The White House has naturally denied and decried Wolff's account, but even if it's only halfway accurate, it presents an appalling view of a frighteningly unqualified and unprepared gang that can't think straight.

Kirkus Review