On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump was already looking ahead to the publicity opportunities that would come in the weeks and months following his inevitable loss to Hillary Clinton. “This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” Trump told his longtime friend Roger Ailes, according to an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s upcoming Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. “I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.” Then, of course, they actually won, shocking not only the nation but their own campaign, and catapulting a man into the White House whom many of his own staffers saw as unfit.

Trump’s shock election also swept up an unlikely eyewitness. Just after the inauguration, Wolff said he was given “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing,” conducting hundreds of interviews with White House aides, including “most members of [Trump’s] senior staff.” The result is a book that depicts vivid scenes of Trump’s ineptitude, and the quagmire of infighting that has bogged down the White House since his ascent. And a handful of details, if true, are particularly telling.

Michael Flynn should’ve listened to his friends

Almost everybody on the Trump team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trump’s opening act at campaign rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” ­Flynn assured them.

Trump’s political wherewithal barely rivals that of the average middle-schooler

Those close to the president knew going in that he was startlingly ignorant, but dismissed that fact as irrelevant—after all, he would never be president.