Bannon wasn’t Wolff’s only source, though. The book is based on “conversations that took place over a period of eighteen months with the president, with most members of his senior staff—some of whom talked to me dozens of times—and with many people who they in turn spoke to,” Wolff writes in the author’s note. His original idea, he says, was to write a fly-on-the-wall account of Trump’s first hundred days. “The president himself encouraged this idea. But given the many fiefdoms in the White House that came into open conflict from the first days of the administration, there seemed no one person able to make this happen. Equally, there was no one to say ‘Go away.’ Hence I became more a constant interloper than an invited guest.”
Wolff’s methods will doubtless attract more scrutiny. In some places, he re-creates entire scenes, complete with dialogue, without explicitly identifying his sources. In others, he attributes withering comments about Trump to some of his current and former aides: “For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the president was an ‘idiot.’ For Gary Cohn, he was ‘dumb as shit.’ For H.R. McMaster he was a ‘dope.’ The list went on.” On Wednesday, two people quoted in the book, Tom Barrack, a longtime friend of Trump, and Katie Walsh, a former White House aide, denied having made the negative comments about Trump that Wolff attributed to them.
Still, the over-all portrait that Wolff draws of a dysfunctional, bitterly divided White House in the first six months of Trump’s Presidency, before the appointment of John Kelly as chief of staff and the subsequent firing of Bannon, has the whiff of authenticity about it—and it echoes news coverage at the time. Other details are impossible to confirm but damning if true. Such was the animosity between Bannon and “Jarvanka”—Bannon’s dismissive term for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner—Wolff reports, that, during one Oval Office meeting, Bannon called Ivanka “a ******* liar,” to which Trump responded,“I told you this is a tough town, baby.” Wolff also quotes Bannon commenting gleefully after Trump decided to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, a decision that Ivanka opposed: “Score. The ***** is dead.”
This is the lying incompetent idiot the Trump cult has pledged their undying support.
