LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Michael Wolff, you had the most extraordinary access to the White House. From the outside it looks chaotic, how does it look from the inside?

MICHAEL WOLFF, AUTHOR: From the inside it looks even more chaotic than it looks from the outside.

LEIGH SALES: Why is it so chaotic?

MICHAEL WOLFF: It's chaotic because Donald Trump is a chaotic figure, he is a chaotic mind.

He has assembled around him a staff so at odds with one another that it could only be chaotic.

It's chaotic because, fundamentally, he has no idea what he's doing there.

LEIGH SALES: You write that during the election campaign there was fairly universal agreement among Trump's closest campaign advisers that not only would he not win and become president, that he probably should not win, that he wasn't fit for the job.

What, then, was the reaction of everyone around when he did in fact win?

MICHAEL WOLFF: They were flabbergasted. Their reaction was no different from almost everyone else in the world's reaction.

This should not have happened. There was no logic by which it did happen, and they were all, they were all, actually, even beyond flabbergasted.

They were fundamentally a deer caught in the headlights.

For all of them, all of them had planned to lose and all of their lives and careers would actually have been better if they had lost.

Winning meant they were, they were exposed. The world could see that they weren't prepared for this job, they didn't know how to do this job.

In many cases, they didn't even want to do this job.

LEIGH SALES: Most Presidents arrive in the White House from a more or less normal political life, and say when they get there it is a big change in circumstances.

They have got the palatial-like residence, they've got their own plane and helicopter, and servants and a lot of security and all the rest of it.

Donald Trump was a very wealthy man and so that was not that dissimilar to his life prior to becoming President. What was the impact of that?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, I actually think that in many ways he got to the White House and thought, "This is a pretty low-rent, dismal place."

You know, I don't think he, there was never the moment in which he understood that this was a quantum leap in his life, a leap in stature, a leap in responsibility, a leap in how everyone else in the world saw him.

You know, quite the opposite.

This was, in some sense, in some sense, just more of the same except not as good or, at least to him, not as good as his circumstances in New York.

LEIGH SALES: What is Trump like in private? When staff attempt to brief him on issues that he needs to know about, what is he like in those moments?

MICHAEL WOLFF: First of all, he doesn't listen to you. He monologizes and goes on at great length about things that often appear to be at best non-sequential and, at worst, almost incoherent.

The other attribute which almost everyone comments on is his repetitions and many people have sort of made a big deal out of this, to say that at the beginning of this administration, he would repeat the same three stories with the same inflexions, the same words, every 30 minutes or so.

And then as time went on, they would say, "Uh-oh, now it's down, you get the same three stories every 10 or 15 minutes."

So it is fundamentally an incredibly disconcerting experience to spend time with Donald Trump.

LEIGH SALES: Well, given that, how did Trump's advisers work out what policies he wants and what he wants to do?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, one of the reasons this first year has been so chaotic is that nobody knows what he wants to do.

In some way he doesn't really want to do anything specific.

He wants to, he wants praise. He wants to win. He doesn't want to work very much and he, in the end, he wants, he wants good press.

So, it is, again, very, extraordinarily difficult for the people around him to impose some kind of normal, attainable, political goals.

LEIGH SALES: You say he wants praise, he wants to win, he wants good press. It's somewhat contradictory, isn't it, when you think that he has marketed himself as an outsider?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I mean, that is the fundamental contradiction. You know, he is an outsider who would very much like to be an insider.

I mean, he wants the Republicans on the Hill to like him. He wants the billionaires in New York to like him. He wants actually, in the end, he wants everybody to like him.

The difference is or the key factor is here, he's not really willing to do what you have to do to get people to like him because he's so entitled, so used to doing absolutely whatever he wants, that he kind of can't adjust his own behaviour to attaining the goals that he wants to attain.

LEIGH SALES: This is an impossible question, but you have spent as much time in the White House as any outside observer: How do you think this is all going to end?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I think it's going to end in tears. I mean, this does not, there is nothing to indicate that this is, that this is, that Trump is going to find his footing as the President of the United States, that he is going to be able to put a staff around him, a staff that knows what they're doing and a staff that he listens to.

What's more, it seems quite clear that he will never settle on the goals, attainable goals, that he wants.

And so, therefore and, in the end, I think, that the real truth is he does not want to be the President of the United States.

He wants to be, instead, Donald Trump and I think those two things are fundamentally contradictory.

LEIGH SALES: Michael Wolff, thanks very much for speaking to us.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Thank you.