The White House is in full denial mode on the juicy gossip in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, with threatened lawsuits and furious denunciations of Steve Bannon for his quotes in it and insistence that the author had no meaningful access:
On Thursday night, the president tweeted: “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!”
Trump has unleashed his lawyer, Charles Harder, who has threatened legal action against Bannon and Wolff.
In a Thursday letter, Harder called on Wolff to “immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination” of his book and to issue a retraction and apology, adding that his firm is investigating what he called “numerous false and/or baseless statements” made about the president in the book.
The White House has also marshaled Trump’s outside allies to bash the book and lambaste Bannon, whom the president said in a statement “lost his mind” after being pushed out of the White House in August.
But at the same time, Trump is touting the fact that Bannon called him “a great man” recently—as if he wants to show off the instability and ego that the Wolff book reveals.
The thing is … why bother? As James Fallows argues, while some of the details in Wolff’s book are new, it's been an open secret all along that this is who Trump is. It may be new just how openly many of Trump’s aides talk about him with contempt in private (though even that could have been discerned from plenty of White House leaks, especially in the early months of 2017), but it’s not new that Trump is:
… profoundly ignorant of politics, policy, and anything resembling the substance of perhaps the world’s most demanding job. He is temperamentally unstable. Most of what he says in public is at odds with provable fact, from “biggest inaugural crowd in history” onward. Whether he is aware of it or not, much of what he asserts is a lie. His functional vocabulary is markedly smaller than it was 20 years ago; the oldest person ever to begin service in the White House, he is increasingly prone to repeat anecdotes and phrases. He is aswirl in foreign and financial complications. He has ignored countless norms of modern governance, from the expectation of financial disclosure to the importance of remaining separate from law-enforcement activities.
Everyone who’s paying attention knows all this. But Trump’s ego requires pushback, so legal threats and posturing it is.