President Donald Trump’s short attention span and newness to governing have been thoroughly explored, but Michael Wolff’s book paints the president as ignorant of the foundations of the U.S. government. | Martin H. Simon/Pool/Getty Images 7 wild details from the new book on Trump's White House

The White House on Wednesday was rocked by revelations about internal chaos — and questions about President Donald Trump’s competence — in an excerpt from a soon-to-be-released book chronicling the early months of his presidency.

Journalist Michael Wolff “conducted conversations and interviews over a period of 18 months with the president, most members of his senior staff, and many people to whom they in turn spoke,” according to the excerpt of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," published in New York Magazine.


Even for a White House used to scintillating leaks appearing in the press, the details in Wolff’s account were explosive. The White House slammed the book, which will be released Tuesday.

“This book is filled with false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access or influence with the White House,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement Wednesday. “Participating in a book that can only be described as trashy tabloid fiction exposes their sad desperate attempts at relevancy.”

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Here are seven of the wildest details from the piece:

1. Trump’s team had concerns about his ability to process information and make decisions

Trump has excoriated media accounts that he spends hours a day watching television and has said he spends a good deal of time reading "documents."

Wolff’s reporting indicated Trump's team felt otherwise.

“He didn’t process information in any conventional sense,” Wolff wrote. “He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate. He trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said [former deputy chief of staff Katie] Walsh, ‘like trying to figure out what a child wants.’”

2. Trump expected to lose in 2016 — and was fine with it

The Trump campaign, as described in Wolff’s book, was expecting defeat from the top down. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway briefed reporters and TV anchors about the expected loss from her Trump Tower office, casting blame on then-Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, according to the book.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, warned by friends that accepting $45,000 for a speech in Russia was a bad idea, reportedly replied that “it would only be a problem if we won.”

Trump himself, after months of publicly pledging to self-fund his candidacy, had been unwilling to chip in the $50 million aides said in September would be needed to keep the campaign afloat until Election Day. Trump wound up giving the campaign a $10 million loan, to be paid back as soon as other money was raised. Campaign finance chairman Steven Mnuchin “came to collect the loan with the wire instructions ready to go so Trump couldn’t conveniently forget to send the money," according to Wolff.

Still, even with an expected loss on the horizon, Trump was upbeat. “This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” Trump reportedly told Roger Ailes a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.”

On election night, Donald Trump Jr. said his father “looked as if he had seen a ghost,” and Melania Trump cried, according to the book.



3. Trump had little interest in studying the Constitution

Trump’s short attention span and newness to governing have been thoroughly explored, but Wolff’s book paints the president as ignorant of the foundations of the U.S. government. Sam Nunberg, an early aide to the Trump campaign, recalled his attempt to talk through the Constitution with the Manhattan billionaire.

“I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” Nunberg said, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

4. After Trump's transition meeting with tech executives, Rupert Murdoch called him "a f------ idiot"

Once Trump was elected, Wolff detailed how Trump's interactions with officials and business leaders pulled him in multiple directions. In mid-December 2016, the president-elect met at his Manhattan skyscraper with a group of technology company executives and then rehashed the meeting with conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Trump told Murdoch that he thought he could work with the tech executives on H-1B visas, which they have long sought as a means of bringing in skilled workers. Murdoch replied that an uptick in H-1B visas might not match the hard line on immigration Trump took during the campaign. “What a f------ idiot,” Murdoch said once he got off the phone with Trump, according to the book.

Trump's administration has since discussed ways to toughen the H-1B visa program.

5. Trump prefers McDonald's — because he's afraid of being poisoned

Trump’s propensity for fast food is apparently not solely due to taste: Wolff reported it's also connected to his fear of being poisoned. The president in particular enjoys food from McDonald’s, Wolff wrote, because “nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.”

Trump’s preference for McDonald’s has not abated since his inauguration, POLITICO reported last month. Keith Schiller, Trump’s longtime aide who worked in the White House as head of Oval Office operations until September, was sometimes sent to the McDonald’s on New York Avenue a few blocks away to satisfy the president’s fast-food hankering when the White House kitchen couldn’t satisfy it.

6. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump made plans for a future Ivanka campaign for president

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who have taken on sprawling but amorphous portfolios in the administration, have apparently toyed with the idea of a political future of their own.

“Between themselves, the two had made an earnest deal: If sometime in the future the opportunity arose, she’d be the one to run for president,” Wolff wrote. “The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”

Kushner and Ivanka have often sought to portray themselves as a moderating force within Trump’s White House, though their impact on his policies has been unclear at times.

7. Ivanka mocks her dad’s famous hair

Trump, famously a stickler over appearance, may be perturbed to learn that his eldest daughter, Ivanka, allegedly has a bit of a comedy routine dedicated to her father’s hairstyle.

“She treated her father with a degree of detachment, even irony, going so far as to make fun of his comb-over to others,” Wolff wrote. “She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: 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 and 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.”

Trump has been more approving of his daughter's looks — including once suggesting he would try to date her if they weren't related.

