The President of the United States is a deranged liar who surrounds himself with sycophants. He is also functionally illiterate and intellectually unsound. He is manifestly unfit for the job. Who knew? Everybody did.

So why has a poorly written book containing this information, padded with much tedious detail, become an overnight sensation, a runaway best-seller, and the topic of every other political column, podcast, and dinner conversation? It seems we are in bigger trouble with reality perception than we might have realized.

A year in, the Trump Presidency remains unimaginable. To think that a madman could be running the world’s most powerful country, to think that the Commander-in-Chief would use Twitter to mouth off about whose nuclear button is bigger or to call himself a “very stable genius,” verges on the impossible. If the word “unthinkable” had a literal meaning, this would be it. It also brings to mind the psychiatrist Judith Herman’s definition of a related word: “Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud,” she once wrote. “This is the meaning of the word unspeakable.” The Trump era is unimaginable, unthinkable, unspeakable. Yet it is waging a daily assault on the public’s sense of sanity, decency, and cohesion. It makes us feel crazy.

At the end of the day, we sit down in front of the screen and watch the late-night comedians state the obvious: they imagine the unimaginable, think the unthinkable, and speak the unspeakable. There is nothing funny about it, but we laugh with relief. However briefly, the comedians free us from the nagging sense that we are crazy. It’s not us, it’s him. The laughter becomes hysterical.

This is the appeal of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” As Virginia Heffernan writes in the Los Angeles Times, Wolff has always specialized in “cartoonish power dynamics among insufferable old men”—the sort of spectacle that others rarely find worth a second look. But, she writes, “because the world finds itself at their mercy, we’d do well to hear their fetid locker room talk interpreted by a writer who can stomach it.”

The problem is that Wolff’s approach is too well-matched to his material. As Andrew Prokop explains on Vox, Wolff’s writing is a rehashing of gossip. What the Times’ and Washington Post’s White House teams have been doing through painstaking reporting—producing stories in which the account of every absurd incident in the life of the Trump Administration is based on conversations with several sources—Wolff accomplishes by absorbing the ambient noise, the self-aggrandizing statements, the overheard (or surreptitiously recorded) conversations, and reshaping them as a narrative all his own. This tone, more than the substance, is what gives the book the flavor of a peek behind the curtain, the sense of someone finally putting words to an “open secret.”

Early tidbits, released ahead of the book itself, have, predictably, proved to be the tastiest morsels. Trump didn’t expect to win! Trump is semi-literate! Ivanka wants to be the first female President! Samantha Bee has done segments on all three of these topics. Anyone with access to Twitter or a television has also been able to observe the President’s uncertain relationship to the English language and his daughter’s unbounded political ambition.

Unlike Bee and the other comedians, who are forever balancing on the angry edge of disgust, Wolff appears to relish observing Trump the Terrible. If the comedians bring reality into sharper focus, Wolff just slaps on broad, sloppy strokes. His writing is comically bad: “a crooked real-estate scam” is a typical phrase; one four-sentence paragraph contains four instances of the word “likely” and six of “unlikely.” His logic is ridiculous: he includes, for example, a rumination on why real-estate entrepreneurs have never before become Presidents, and concludes that this is because real estate often involves questionable monetary relationships—and not, say, because the business does not offer the policy, legal, moral, or intellectual training that is usually expected of high-level politicians.

But, worst of all, Wolff’s reporting is not reporting. The book’s most resonant revelation so far concerns comments Wolff attributed to Steve Bannon, who supposedly called the June, 2016, Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer “treasonous,” said it should have been reported to the F.B.I., and expressed certainty that the Russians had been taken up to meet Donald Trump himself. Of these three assertions, one is stating the obvious—the Russian overture should have been reported to the F.B.I.—and two are false. It is not treason to meet with representatives of a country with which the United States is not in a state of war. And, according to my reporting, the Russians who met with Trump’s campaign team were not in fact taken up to meet the candidate himself. Wolff doesn’t bother with corroboration.

Wolff’s book seems to occupy a middle ground: between the writing of White House newspaper reporters, who exercise preternatural restraint when writing about the Administration, and the late-night comedians, who offer a sense of release from that restraint because they are not held to journalistic standards of veracity. That middle ground, where there is neither restraint nor accuracy, shouldn’t exist. That “Fire and Fury” can occupy so much of the public-conversation space degrades our sense of reality further, while creating the illusion of affirming it.