While I was eating breakfast at the Four Seasons in Georgetown on Tuesday morning, a veteran Washington journalist stopped by my table to say hello. “Nice to see you,” Michael Duffy, a former editor at Time, deadpanned, with a grin on his face, before introducing himself as “Mark Berman, Washington Post.” As inside jokes go, it was pointed and perfectly timed. As everyone at the table knew by now, Mark Berman of the Washington Post has never been to the Four Seasons for breakfast, despite the fact that “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff’s new tell-all book about life in Donald Trump’s dysfunctional White House, says that he has.

For the past week, all of Washington—and, indeed, much of the country, judging by the book sales—had been reading, digesting, and debating the book, the ethics and accuracy of Wolff’s journalism, and the horrifying details about the naked-emperor-in-the-Oval Office President that he exposes. The book’s scathing portrait of an incompetent, incoherent, “semi-literate” wild man in the White House has, understandably, gotten most of the attention—especially since Trump took personal charge of the effort to discredit it. The news on Tuesday afternoon that one of Wolff’s main sources, the former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, had lost his job running the conservative Web site Breitbart after his falling out with Trump was sure to keep the “Fire and Fury” tempest roiling.

Amid such an uproar, the matter of Mark Berman’s nonexistent breakfast at the Four Seasons hardly ranks. Still, even among the many errors in the book, some big and many small, this one stood out. It was the kind of mistake that only someone who doesn’t know Washington could have made—the kind of mistake that matters to a small handful of D.C. players. And it prompts readers to ask, If Wolff got the small things wrong, did he get the big things wrong as well? The Trump White House has seized on such mistakes to call into question the book’s damning, and mostly accurate, larger portrayal of this Presidency.

Wolff had the wrong Berman. His book’s account of a breakfast at the Four Seasons last February, when Trump’s daughter Ivanka dazzled the wary natives in their natural habitat, should have named Mike Berman, a heavy-hitting Democratic lawyer and lobbyist who arrived in Washington, in the nineteen-sixties, as an aide to Walter Mondale. In D.C. terms, mistaking a Washington fixture like Mike Berman for a young national reporter at the Post with the same last name is a pretty big deal. Washington is a village, a small town, a one-industry kind of place—and it takes itself very seriously. For at least the past couple of decades, breakfast at the Four Seasons has been the city’s canteen, its water cooler, the place to go when you want everyone to know whom you are having breakfast with. You can’t get the names wrong. That’s the whole point of the exercise.

When I called Wolff shortly after my breakfast at the Four Seasons to ask about the book and the controversies it has spawned, he proudly declared, “I am so not a member of this club.” A New York author and columnist previously best known for a scathing, insider-y takedown of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Wolff told me that, as he reported “Fire and Fury,” he had spent little time talking to, or worrying about, “the permanent establishment” of Washington.

He did not go to the Four Seasons for breakfast or to Georgetown cocktail parties for gossip. He said that he came down from New York, checked into the Hay-Adams Hotel, across Lafayette Square from the White House (where rooms, according to the Web site, start at more than three hundred dollars a night), and got to work, which by his account largely consisted of hanging out in the lobby of the West Wing of the White House, acting as a fly on the wall. Occasionally, Wolff allowed, he consulted with Mike Allen, the well-sourced journalist, whose daily e-mail newsletter for the Web site Axios often features leaks from the Trump Administration, as well as a “relatively small group of insiderish people, people who have been helpful to me.” But that, Wolff insisted, was it as far as his contacts with the permanent denizens of the Washington swamp that Trump promised to drain.

It’s clear that Wolff used his outsider status as a selling point with the members of the Trump team whom he persuaded to coöperate—and that they did so despite his long-standing willingness to break much crockery, and even basic rules of honesty and fairness, in the pursuit of a story. Go back and read Michelle Cottle’s 2004 profile of Wolff in The New Republic: she nailed it.

But, at least in public, Wolff affects an almost breezy disregard for indictments like Cottle’s—and such accounts didn’t stop major figures in the Trump White House, including the President himself, from talking with him. When I asked Wolff about the book’s factual errors, like the Berman mixup, he was dismissive, saying that he saw them as more or less irrelevant to the larger truths that he had told about Trump. Mostly, Wolff talked like a man who couldn’t help but marvel at his own good fortune: he’d written a book that he thought might just bring down the President—and he was making a killing.

Wolff pointed out that, as of the close of business on Monday, a million copies of the book had sold in just four days. “I’m going around saying, ‘It’s just a book,’ but it has become something so much larger,” he said, citing Trump’s attacks on the book and his failed attempt to prevent it from being published. “The President seems to think this book is some kind of significant threat, and that changes the context,” Wolff said. “Whereas with a regular book, a Mike Berman for a Mark Berman . . . would have been of no consequence whatsoever, now it’s suddenly a state question.”

But, I asked, what about the facts? Wolff’s attitude about them struck me as, well, a bit Trumpian. Would he fix mistakes in the next edition? “Yes, sure, the Bermans will be sorted out,” Wolff promised. But he still seemed to think that I was missing the point. “Fire and Fury” was like a Bob Woodward book, he insisted: a revelatory, scoopy backstage account of the White House with no sourcing or footnotes or explicit attribution. “The reader is basically going to have to trust me on that, or trust his own sense of, does this comport with everything else he knows?” Wolff said. “That’s how you get an inside portrait.”

Besides, Wolff added, all the second-guessing about details like who was at breakfast tended to obscure the fact that the book provides a vivid portrait of Trump based upon on-the-record quotes from formerly close advisers like Bannon and Katie Walsh, the former White House deputy chief of staff. Even Wolff’s critics seem to accept that his over-all portrayal of a dispirited, demoralized White House, where many senior aides loathed and feared their boss, was basically correct. I asked Wolff if he had started out planning to portray Trump so harshly. “I had no preconception,” he said. “I was perfectly willing to write a ‘Trump can be successful’ kind of thing, a contrarian view that is reasonably up my alley. Then I just started to listen to these guys, and they started to talk to me, and it was like, ‘Oh, God!’ These senior people say, ‘Do you have any idea what it is like to work for this man?’ ”