Fire and Fury. Inside the Trump White House.
By Michael Wolff.
First published in the United States in 2018 by Henry Holt and Company
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Little, Brown
Copyright © 2018 by Michael Wolff
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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AUTHORS NOTE
The reason to write this book could not be more obvious. With the inauguration
of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, the United States entered the eye of the
most extraordinary political storm since at least Watergate. As the day
approached, I set out to tell this story in as contemporaneous a fashion as
possible, and to try to see life in the Trump White House through the eyes of the
people closest to it.
This was originally conceived as an account of the Trump administration’s
first hundred days, that most traditional marker of a presidency. But events
barreled on without natural pause for more than two hundred days, the curtain
coming down on the first act of Trump’s presidency only with the appointment
of retired general John Kelly as the chief of staff in late July and the exit of chief
strategist Stephen K. Bannon three weeks later.
The events I’ve described in these pages are 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. The first interview occurred well before I
could have imagined a Trump White House, much less a book about it, in late
May 2016 at Trump’s home in Beverly Hills—the then candidate polishing off a
pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla as he happily and idly opined about a range of
topics while his aides, Hope Hicks, Corey Lewandowski, and Jared Kushner,
went in and out of the room. Conversations with members of the campaign’s
team continued through the Republican Convention in Cleveland, when it was
still hardly possible to conceive of Trump’s election. They moved on to Trump
Tower with a voluble Steve Bannon—before the election, when he still seemed
like an entertaining oddity, and later, after the election, when he seemed like a
miracle worker.
Shortly after January 20, I took up something like a semipermanent seat on a
couch in the West Wing. Since then I have conducted more than two hundred
interviews.
(...)
For whatever reason, almost everyone I contacted—senior members of the
White House staff as well as dedicated observers of it—shared large amounts of
time with me and went to great effort to help shed light on the unique nature of
life inside the Trump White House. In the end, what I witnessed, and what this
book is about, is a group of people who have struggled, each in their own way,
to come to terms with the meaning of working for Donald Trump.
I owe them an enormous debt.
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