This Michael Wolff book is amazing

[$tevie]

I wonder if it can be trusted as being the truth? Because it is freaking incredible.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/201...trump.html

[Ted King]

There's a whole mine full of worthy quotes there:

Early in the campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” Nunberg recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

[Ted King]

Ailes, a veteran of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations, tried to impress on Trump the need to create a White House structure that could serve and protect him. “You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff,” he told Trump. “And you need a son of a bitch who knows Washington. You’ll want to be your own son of a bitch, but you don’t know Washington.” Ailes had a suggestion: John Boehner, who had stepped down as Speaker of the House only a year earlier.

“Who’s that?” asked Trump.

[samintx]

It is going to make millions. I have been reading excerpts and I love it.

[NewtonMP2100]

.....so y'all are all.....Hungry.....Like the....Wolff......??

[mrbigstuff]

Their messiah does not have to bother with piddling things like the constitution. Really.

[Ted King]

Somebody trying to rain on this parade:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018...iable.html

A 2004 New Republic profile of Wolff meanwhile noted that “the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created—springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events.” The same piece quoted an editor who worked with Wolff as saying “his great gift is the appearance of intimate access. He is adroit at making the reader think that he has spent hours and days with his subject, when in fact he may have spent no time at all.” A 1998 article about Wolff’s book Burn Rate surfaced Wednesday by writer Brad Plumer notes that several of the subjects of the book say Wolff “invented or changed quotes” that were attributed to them.

There's more. As always, we should be cautious about things like this, especially in the initial stages - but, to be honest, I don't want to because it feels so much better to think this is all 100% true.

[pdq]

Ted makes a good point. I don't know about Wolff per se, but in any of these palace-intrigue tell-alls, there's bound to be some stuff that's wrong.

In coming days, no doubt we'll hear calls from Trump supporters to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as such errors become identified. But there's just too much "baby" there, both within Wolff's book and elsewhere.

[pdq]

Like this:

In one passage from “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” Wolff recounts how Roger Ailes recommended former House speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to serve as Trump's chief of staff. Trump's response, according to Wolff: “Who’s that?”

Never mind that Trump had golfed with Boehner in 2013 and mentioned him several times on the 2016 campaign trail. Using the Donald Trump Factbase, I found Trump mentioning Boehner on the campaign trail at least four times: April 10, 2016; Nov. 30, 2015; Oct. 14, 2015; and Sept. 25, 2015. He also tweeted about him on Oct. 8, 2015, and Sept. 25, 2015 — that last date being when Boehner resigned as speaker during the 2016 campaign.

or this:

This Wolff excerpt has a 500-word-long chunk of recreated verbatim dialogue between Bannon and Ailes.
Come on.

So: grain of salt, people. I wouldn't dismiss the whole thing, though...

[$tevie]

I can easily believe that Trump would talk about Boehner and then say “Who’s that?” because of either his dementia, or because he was talking about Boehner without actually thinking about Boehner -- which I suspect is true of many of his statements, since I doubt he had any real interest in Boehner nor in much of what he is forced to discuss.

That said, I am also quite open to the possibility that the anecdote is BS.