Trump Battles To Block Publication Of Bombshell Book
Rattled by a one-two punch of betrayal and scandal, Donald Trump on Thursday tried to block the publication of a bare-knuckle book that portrays his White House as a fetid stew of backbiting, incompetence and dysfunction.
Trump instructed his lawyers to prevent the release of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” — an expose by author and political muckraker Michael Wolff — which quotes key Trump aides expressing serious doubt about his fitness for office.
The book — which paints Trump as mentally unstable and far out of his depth — quotes at length his former ally and chief strategist Steve Bannon, who also received a “cease and desist” order from Trump’s attorneys.
“Your publication of the false/baseless statements about Mr. Trump gives rise to, among other claims, defamation by libel, defamation by libel per se, false light invasion of privacy, tortious interference with contractual relations, and inducement of breach of contract,” Trump’s lawyers said in the letter to Wolff.
The publishers responded by moving the release date up by four days to Friday.
In the book, Bannon is quoted accusing Trump’s eldest son Don Jr of “treasonous” contacts with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, and saying the president’s daughter Ivanka, who imagines running for president one day, is “dumb as a brick.”
But it is Trump himself who is cast in the most unfavorable light by a series of his top aides.
The book claims that 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.”
White House issued a scorched-earth dismissal of the book, its author and his sources.
“I don’t think (Americans) really care about some trash that an author that no one had ever heard of until today, or a fired employee, wants to peddle,” said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, calling the book “complete fantasy.”
‘I don’t talk to him’
Behind the scenes though, Trump has been enraged by the betrayal of Bannon — a man who engineered the New York real estate mogul’s link to the nationalist far right and helped create a pro-Trump media ecosystem.
“He called me a great man last night. He obviously changed his tune pretty quick,” Trump said in the White House’s Roosevelt Room Thursday.
“I don’t talk to him.”
Sanders suggested that Bannon’s employer, Breitbart News, should consider firing him.
A day earlier, Trump unleashed a spectacular denunciation of his former ally, describing him as insane and irrelevant.
“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” Trump said in a written statement.
Bannon, who left the White House in August, is also quoted in the book as saying that the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 election will focus on money laundering.
The investigation by Mueller, a former FBI director, is looking into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to help get him elected — a charge the president has repeatedly and vehemently denied.
‘You should have called the FBI’
Russia-related allegations in the book also ensnare Don Junior, who took a meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016 after an intermediary promised material that would incriminate Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and then campaign chairman Paul Manafort also attended the meeting at Trump Tower in New York.
“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers,” Bannon was quoted as saying in the book.
“They didn’t have any lawyers.
“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately,” he said.
Disbelief over victory
Wolff’s book — which he says is based on interviews with Trump, his senior aides and others — makes a litany of shocking claims, including Trump’s belief that he installed Mohamed bin Salman as Saudi Arabia’s crown prince.
“We’ve put our man on top,” Trump is said to have claimed to friends.
The book also claims that Trump considered appointing a friend to the Supreme Court vacancy filled by Neil Gorsuch, eats food from McDonald’s because he believes it to be safe from poison, and that his team did not believe he was capable of winning the election.
“Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears — and not of joy,” it said.
The book even deals with the subject of Trump’s infamous hairdo, citing Ivanka as telling friends it was the result of a combover from the front and sides of his head, stiffened by hair spray.
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