On Thursday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers threatened to sue Mr. Wolff’s publisher, Henry Holt, if it did not halt the book’s release and apologize for its contents — an extraordinary attempt by a sitting president to stifle critical coverage. Henry Holt responded by moving up the book’s release by four days. Mr. Wolff may be looking at his first No. 1 best seller.

Even for the brazenly confident Mr. Wolff, a status-mad needler with a habit of being ejected from expensive restaurants, this is a new level of notoriety. He is accustomed to angering the Manhattan power elite, not the leader of the free world. “It’s almost a natural evolution of Michael Wolff, that one day the president would be talking about him from the White House,” said Janice Min, the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, where Mr. Wolff is a columnist.

His acidic portrayal of Mr. Trump as a president in over his head, disdained by aides who are astounded by his lack of fitness for the job, has dominated headlines and social media for days, along with his purportedly verbatim quotes from figures like Mr. Bannon and Mr. Murdoch dismissing Mr. Trump as a fool.

But Mr. Wolff has picked up as many foes as fans during his years as a slashing columnist — perhaps more, even — and critics have raised questions about the veracity of his reporting, saying that he has a history of being casual with his facts.

“Historically, one of the problems with Wolff’s omniscience is that while he may know all, he gets some of it wrong,” David Carr, the late New York Times media columnist, wrote in 2008, reviewing a Wolff book that, he pointed out, contained errors.