“Journalist” Michael Wolff’s new book “Fire and Fury” has been provoking plenty of wrath from the White House.
The new #1 bestseller claims to detail the first year of the Trump presidency, allegedly based on over 200 interviews conducted with Trump and his associates, including senior staff. The book paints a picture of a White House in disarray, and contains all bits of gossip and embarrassing tidbits about the President.
Of course, everything in the book is alleged, and a number of flaws have been pointed out from excerpts made available in the days before it even hit the shelves. In one such occasion, the book claimed that Trump didn’t know who John Boehner was. To debunk that claim, all one had to do was search “Boehner” on Trump’s Twitter timeline to discover tweets about the former Speaker of the House dating back to 2011.
One of Trump’s lawyers threatened to sue if the book was published based on it containing knowingly false and unsubstantiated claims, but obviously that didn’t stop it from hitting shelves.
Trump, too, blasted the book and its author:
I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2018
And it’s not just Trump and his allies blasting Wolff. If you’ve never heard of the “journalist” prior to this book, you wouldn’t be the only one, as his work is relegated mainly to publications like GQ and The Hollywood Reporter. He has the resume of a gossip columnist, and the reputation of one to back it up.
The GOP’s official Twitter account tweeted out a summary of (mainly) liberals blasting Wolff’s incompetence as a journalist.
The reviews are in… pic.twitter.com/UNdkNbBEFF
— GOP (@GOP) January 5, 2018
One of those quoted, CNN’s Brian Stelter, found three errors on a single page of the book:
Via WashPost's @MarkBerman: This page in Wolff's book has 3 errors. @HilaryRosen's name is misspelled. Wilbur Ross was the commerce nominee, not labor. And Berman says he's never been to this restaurant. pic.twitter.com/tRqxmU3Sct
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 5, 2018
The GOP’s talking points on the book are as follows:
Even Wolff himself has admitted that he plays loose with the facts… in the book’s prologue! He makes sure not to put any blame on himself for that though, saying it’s the staffers he interviewed that could’ve lied to him about a whole host of incidents contained in the book. “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. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book,” he writes.
“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.”
Well isn’t that convenient? One can only wonder what Wolff’s criteria was in determining what to include. I’m assuming it was “anything that makes Trump look bad.”
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