Article content continued

Oh my God, he just tweeted this

Like the books that came before it, and almost certainly like the ones still to come, Kurtz’s book, “Media Madness: Donald Trump, The Press, And The War Over The Truth,” offers a portrait of a White House riven by chaos, with aides scrambling to respond to the president’s impulses and writing policy to fit his tweets, according to excerpts obtained by The Washington Post.

Kurtz, who worked at The Washington Post from 1981 to 2010, writes that Trump’s aides even privately coined a term for Trump’s behaviour — “Defiance Disorder.” The phrase refers to Trump’s seeming compulsion to do whatever it is his advisers are most strongly urging against, leaving his team to handle the fallout.

Photo by Susan Walsh/AP Photo

The book officially hits stores Jan. 29.

Early in the administration, Kurtz describes White House aides waking up one Saturday morning in March, confused and “blindsided,” to find that Trump had — without any evidence — accused former President Barack Obama on Twitter of wiretapping him during the campaign.

“Nobody in the White House quite knew what to do,” Kurtz writes.

Priebus watched as his phone exploded with email and text messages, according to the excerpts. “Priebus knew the staff would have to fall into line to prove the tweet correct, the opposite of the usual process of vetting proposed pronouncements,” Kurtz writes. “Once the president had committed to 140 characters, he was not going to back off.”

In another scene, Kurtz paints a largely positive picture of Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, but notes — as has been previously reported — that Trump repeatedly worried whether the couple were making the right decision moving to Washington to take jobs in his administration.