Author of New Book on Trump WH: I Can't Be Sure if Everything I Wrote Is True
In his new book — “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” — author Michael Wolff makes a series of explosive claims about President Donald Donald Trump and his administration.
But within the book itself, Wolff admits that he has no way of being certain that every part of what he relayed about the Trump White House is absolutely true.
Business Insider pointed out that on the tenth page of the book’s prologue, Wolff “included a note that casts significant doubt on the reliability of the specifics contained in the rest of (the book’s) pages.”
Wolff wrote that many of the sources he interviewed lied to to him, while others contradicted each other. But he indicated that in some of those cases, he included the accounts with the goal of “allowing the reader to judge” the validity of the claims.
“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,” Wolff wrote. “These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.”
He went on to write that, “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 the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true,” Wolff added.
Many of the claims in Wolff’s book — which was released Friday despite a cease-and-desist letter from Trump’s lawyer seeking to halt its publication — seem to suggest that the president is unfit for office, and that he did not know what he was getting into by running for the presidency.
In an interview Friday on NBC’s “Today,” Wolff expanded on those sentiments, comparing the president to a “child.”
“I will tell you the one description that everyone gave, everyone has in common: They all say he is like a child,” Wolff said. “And what they mean by that is, he has a need for immediate gratification. It is all about him.”
He also said that “100 percent of the people around,” including his “senior advisers, family members, every single one of them, questions his intelligence and fitness for office.”
But as noted by NBC News, much of what Wolff wrote has not yet been confirmed.
In the past, the author has been accused of changing or even making up quotes, particularly in his 1998 book “Burn Rate.”
The White House has pushed back on the book, with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders calling it “complete fantasy.”
“I’m not going to waste my time or the country’s time going page by page and talking about a book that is complete fantasy and just full of tabloid gossip,” Sanders said.
Trump himself denied Wolff’s claim that he was given exclusive access to the West Wing of the White House, writing on Twitter that he “authorized Zero access.”
Wolff, though, said on “Today” that he “absolutely” spoke to the president.
“Whether he realized it was an interview or not, I don’t know, but it certainly was not off the record,” Wolff said. “I spoke to him after the inauguration, yes. And I had spoken to, I mean I spent about three hours with the president over the course of the campaign and in the White House, so my window into Donald Trump is pretty significant.”
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