Tell-all offers insider’s view of White House amid infighting, scrutinising the president’s inner circle, his intellect and his hair

Washington DC, the media, a panicked White House and an incredulous American public were rocked on Wednesday morning when the Guardian published the first details of Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

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Wolff’s book was much anticipated because he had been granted extensive access to the West Wing and claimed to have conducted about 200 interviews. A summary of some of the key revelations follows.



Campaign

No one in the Trump camp thought he had a chance of beating Hillary Clinton, Wolff writes. The candidate expected to leverage his defeat for wealth, fame and a Trump-branded TV network. Key advisers wanted jobs in television or politics.

In a passage with heavy resonance now, the future national security adviser Michael Flynn is quoted as telling friends that taking $45,000 from the Russians for a speech “would only be a problem if we won”.

Marriage

Melania Trump was among those who thought her husband would not win. On election night she was “in tears – and not of joy”.

The president and his third wife have separate bedrooms (“the first time since the Kennedy White House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms”). And on inauguration day, Wolff writes, Trump “was visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears and would return to New York”.

Wolff also recounts Trump’s alleged technique for seducing married women: quiz their husbands about infidelity, tempt them with “girls coming in from Los Angeles at three o’clock” … and have their wives listen in on speakerphone.

White House

Trump’s bedroom contains three TV screens after he insisted on two more being installed.

“If he was not having his 6.30 dinner with Steve Bannon,” Wolff writes, “then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls – the phone was his true contact point with the world – to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another.”

Trump had an angry confrontation with the Secret Service: he wanted a lock on the bedroom door, but the agency responsible for security in possibly the most secure building in the world did not.

The president also “­reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor” and “imposed a set of new rules: Nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s – nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would let housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his own bed.”

Hair

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ivanka Trump discussed her father’s hair with friends, according to the book. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Trump’s much-discussed haircut is mocked in the book – by his daughter.

Ivanka “often described the mechanics behind it to friends”, Wolff writes. “An absolutely clean pate – a contained island after scalp reduction surgery – surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men – the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.”

Self-image

In a passage that perhaps points to Trump’s underrated understanding of his unique political appeal, Wolff quotes an unnamed “foreign model” asking him: “What is this ‘white trash’?”

“They’re people just like me,” says Trump, “only they’re poor.”

Intellect

Wolff provides telling details about unsuccessful attempts to brief Trump on policy, domestic or foreign, or even the basics of the US constitution.

“I got as far as the fourth amendment,” says his sometime aide Sam Nunberg, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

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Mental health

Most White House aides and even family members doubt the 71-year-old’s capacity for the job. Trump allegedly did not know, for example, who the former House speaker John Boehner was when he was suggested for chief of staff. Wolff also writes that the president repeats himself constantly, often about what TV anchors have said about him that day.

In an “extracted column” for the Hollywood Reporter this week, Wolff wrote that at a festive season party at Mar-a-Lago, a “heavily made-up” president “failed to recognize a succession of old friends”.

Russia

Bannon was Wolff’s main source on how the White House reacted to Trump’s firing of the FBI director James Comey – which he says was Ivanka and Kushner’s idea – and the appointment of the special counsel Robert Mueller.

Bannon strenuously denies any involvement with Russia-related events but does not spare the rod on others: the meeting at Trump Tower was “treasonous”, “unpatriotic” and “bad shit” and there is “zero” chance Trump did not know of the meeting involving his son Donald Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. The president may have met the Russians himself, Bannon says.

He also suggests that Trump has never understood what trouble he is in over Russia and claims money-laundering charges, such as those denied by Trump’s onetime campaign chairman Manafort, are what will bring the Mueller investigation to its head, probably involving Deutsche Bank and the Kushner property empire.

Wolff quotes the former Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes telling Trump: “You’ve got to get right on Russia. You need to take this seriously, Donald.”

“Jared has this,” Trump replies. “It’s all worked out.”

Republicans

Attempts to control Trump include the former White House press secretary Sean Spicer saying he was “glad to be out of the loop” when family members and close aides met with Trump Air Force One to write a misleading statement about the Trump Tower meeting with a group of Russians.

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Trump’s only party allies are the New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, and the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Both wanted key administration roles but were rejected – in Christie’s case by Ivanka Trump, referring to his role in sending Jared Kushner’s father to jail.

Infighting

Trump’s response to Mueller is at the heart of the extensively quoted derision from staff members about the president’s mental state; the president himself is quoted deriding everyone around him, sons – known to White House staff as “Uday and Qusay”, after Saddam Hussein’s offspring – and daughter included.

“There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what,” Wolff writes. “For [the treasury secretary] Steve Mnuchin and [the former chief of staff] Reince Priebus he was an ‘idiot’. For [the economic adviser] Gary Cohn, he was ‘dumb as shit’. For [national security adviser] HR McMaster, he was a ‘dope’. The list went on.”

Bannon is ranged against Kushner and Ivanka and in the words of Richard Nixon’s adviser Henry Kissinger: “It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”

It seems perhaps the most hated entity is “Jarvanka”, AKA Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Wolff also writes that the couple had a much-mocked deal: that “the first woman president … would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”

Confidants

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Trump’s outside advisers express similar derision. Rupert Murdoch reportedly called Trump “a fucking idiot”. Tom Barrack has denied saying Trump is “not only crazy, he’s stupid”. Ailes is depicted as relatively supportive, but he died in May 2017.

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Wolff also discusses Trump’s preference for women as close aides, Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway being prominent examples: “He needed special – extra-special – handling. Women, he explained to one friend with something like self–awareness, ­generally got this more precisely than men. In particular, women who ­self-selected themselves as tolerant of or oblivious to or amused by or steeled against his casual misogyny and constant sexual subtext – which was somehow, incongruously and often jarringly, matched with paternal regard – got this.”

Bannon

Wolff writes that Bannon, his chief source in the book, was solely responsible for Trump’s “American carnage” inaugural speech, which was delivered with the new president’s “golf face”, a scrunched-up expression of boiling rage that experienced handlers know to be wary of.

The explosion of controversy, though, may have imperilled Bannon’s perch at Breitbart News. The billionaire backers Robert and Rebekah Mercer have withdrawn their patronage.

The Guardian

Bannon has told supporters before that they should read this publication to understand how “they” think. Thanks to Wolff, we know now that “though one of the leading English language left-leaning newspapers”, the Guardian is nevertheless the former key adviser’s “favorite paper”.