4/1/2018
Michael Wolff: Who is author behind explosive Trump book?
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is already topping online best seller charts before its release
A book yet to be released by journalist Michael Wolff has already started grabbing headlines around the world.
Mr Trump's press secretary Sarah Sanders has rebuffed Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House as "trashy tabloid fiction".
But Mr Wolff claims he had high levels of access, and that he conducted more than 200 interviews with Mr Trump and his staff across 18 months.
Some of the book's excerpts have already been criticised and questioned.
So what do we know about the author himself?
Michael Wolff is a 64-year-old journalist who has written regular columns for publications including New York magazine and Vanity Fair.
His style has typically centred on giving readers a glimpse into the inner-workings of a subject, often media organisations and the moguls behind them.
Some of his writing has proved controversial, with subjects publicly disputing his reporting.
10 explosive claims in new Trump book
Donald Trump raising a fist, surrounded by cameras, arriving to his inauguration ceremonyImage copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Mr Wolff's book claims that Mr Trump and his campaign did not expect to win the election
The father-of-four was previously best known for his biography of Rupert Murdoch, titled The Man Who Owns the News, which was released in 2008.
After winning national awards for his reporting, he was described in a 2004 profile in The New Republic as the "It Boy of New York media". Writer Michelle Cottle tried to characterise his writing style by speaking to him and other journalists who knew him.
"Even Wolff acknowledges that conventional reporting isn't his bag. Rather, he absorbs the atmosphere and gossip swirling around him at cocktail parties, on the street, and especially during those long lunches," she wrote in the cover story.
Mr Wolff explained the context around the White House tell-all in excerpts released to New York magazine on Wednesday, before penning a second piece for the Hollywood Reporter, released on Thursday.
The author claims he was able to take up "something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing" after he interviewed Mr Trump in June 2016.
He said the president encouraged the idea himself, writing that "Trump seemed to say, knock yourself out".
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said "a lot of things" released so far are "completely untrue"
He says there were no ground rules placed on his access and that he was not required to make promises on his reporting, making for a "front row view of Trump's presidency".
Mr Wolff has already acknowledged the difficulty with the book's sourcing, saying interviewees went on and off the record sporadically or "would provide accounts in confidence, only to subsequently share their views widely".
In the Hollywood Reporter, Mr Wolff has revealed his opinion that Mr Trump's White House was divided by a "near-violent factional war".
He said his "indelible impression" was that staff, including Mr Trump's family, "all - 100 percent - came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job".
Quotes attributed to former White House strategist Steve Bannon in Mr Wolff's book are already causing political shockwaves.
Mr Trump's lawyers say they have issued Mr Bannon a cease-and-desist order, accusing him of violating a non-disclosure agreement and defaming the president in his conversations with Mr Wolff.
Mr Trump has hit out at Mr Bannon, saying he "lost his mind" when he lost his job
What is already being disputed?
The book is not officially released until 9 January, but people have already started poking holes in some of the harder to believe anecdotes.
One passage, released in New York magazine, implies the president did not know who former House speaker John Boehner was when former Fox News head Roger Ailes recommended him for the position of Mr Trump's chief of staff.
But as the Washington Post points out, Donald Trump had previously golfed with him, and has tweeted about Mr Boehner multiple times.
@realDonaldTrump
Speaker John Boehner, who I like, should never have agreed to raise taxes because the Republicans got absolutely nothing for it!
4:20 AM - Feb 26, 2013
End of Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump
Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has described a claim about him as "absurd" and "a complete fabrication". The Times newspaper reported that the book says Mr Blair had shared a "juicy rumour" with Mr Trump's son-in-law that the UK government had his campaign under surveillance.
Tony Blair in front of a black background, in a photograph from 2012Image copyrightPA
Image caption
Mr Blair denied to BBC Radio 4 that he had any conversation with Jared Kushner
A billionaire friend of Donald Trump, Thomas Barrack Jnr, has also denied a quote attributed to him by Mr Wolff, telling a New York Times reporter that he never said Mr Trump was "not only crazy, he's stupid."
'Looseness with the truth'
NBC's political reporter posted an extract from Wolff's introduction, which addresses the inherent problem that a lot of stories coming from the White House conflict with one another.
"Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book. Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true."
@DonaldJTrumpJr
More lies, go back and look, Boehner and #potus spent time together well before the election. Just another pathetic attempt to smear @realDonaldTrump #fakenews https://twitter.com/John_Hudson/status/948605909898612737 …
4:39 AM - Jan 4, 2018
End of Twitter post by @DonaldJTrumpJr
So the book may make an interesting and compelling read, but the stories inside are taken from recollections and opinions of people who spoke to Mr Wolff, rather than being indisputable fact.
So whether Melania Trump really was in tears on election night, or if Ivanka Trump really did mock her father's "comb-over" and has presidential ambitions of her own, remains to be seen.
Either way, people seem to want to read the book. It has already reached the top of Amazon's best sellers' chart, days before its official release.
No comments:
Post a Comment