Author of the book about the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, has been described as “one of our least reliable journalists”, but also that “our least reliable president could finally find himself undone at the hands” of Wolff, and that the book will pay off “from a real journalistic impact”.

Trump has responded by predictably slamming Wolff, but also praising himself – “I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius … and a very stable genius at that!” His ‘Streisand effect’ promotion of Wolff’s book may not be one of the most genius things he has done.

In a prologue to his book Wolff admits:

“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.

“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.”

But Wolff claims to have trasncripts of over two hundred interviews. Business Insider: The author of the explosive new Trump book says he can’t be sure if parts of it are true

The book itself, reviewed by Business Insider from a copy acquired prior to its Friday publication, is not always clear about what level of confidence the author has in any particular assertion.

Lengthy, private conversations are reported verbatim, as are difficult-to-ascertain details like what somebody was thinking or how the person felt.

Wolff attributes his book to “more than two hundred interviews” with people including Trump and “most members of his senior staff.” According to the news website Axios, Wolff has dozens of hours of tapes to back up what he said.

They include assertions that Trump never wanted to be president, that all of his senior staff considered him an idiot, that he tried to lock the Secret Service out of his room, and that he ate at McDonald’s to avoid being poisoned.

Business Insider rounded up some more of the most eye-catching claims in this article.

Predictably Trump is in full Monty attack/denial mode (probably the best promotion possible for the book in as per the “Streisand effect’).

Threats, followed by a swipe at his favourite targets (now including Wolff and Steve Bannon), and then promotion of his favourite person – himself:

Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!

Now that Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the Fake News Mainstream Media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence.

Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames.

I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star .to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!

This may not be a genius response though. It reinforces the image of Trump as a self obsessed egomaniac. Perhaps he is so much a genius it appears to ordinary people as idiotic.

Drew Magary both slams the author but also claims : Michael Wolff Did What Every Other White House Reporter Is Too Cowardly to Do.

I’m gonna begin this post with the same disclaimer that needs to come with every post about Michael Wolff, which is that Wolff is a fart-sniffer whose credibility is often suspect and who represents the absolute worst of New York media-cocktail-circuit inbreeding. But in a way, it’s fitting that our least reliable president could finally find himself undone at the hands of one of our least reliable journalists.

…but the book has already caused legitimate upheaval in the administration, opened a permanent rift between President Trump and Bannon, AND it confirms what we have all always known to be true: that the president severely lacks the cognitive ability to do this job, and that he is surrounded at all times by a cadre of enablers, dunces, and outright thieves.

As much as I wanna discredit Wolff, he got receipts and, more important, he used them. Wolff got it all. Wolff nailed them.

And look how he did it. He did it by sleazily ingratiating himself with the White House, gaining access, hosting weird private dinners, and then taking full advantage of the administration’s basic lack of knowledge about how reporting works. Some of the officials Wolff got on tape claim to be unaware that they were on the record.

…he’s very much up front in the book’s intro about the fact that he was able to exploit the incredible “lack of experience” on display here. In other words, Wolff got his book by playing a bunch of naive dopes.

Wolff has spent this week thoroughly exploiting Trump and his minions the same way they’ve exploited the cluelessness of others. And he pulled it off because, at long last, there was a reporter out there willing to toss decorum aside and burn bridges the same way Trump does.

He has revealed the Emperor without clothes (that many people could see but media were too gutless to go hard on).

Everyone around Donald Trump is too polite to Donald Trump. Democrats, foreign dignitaries, underlings… all of them.

And the White House press is perhaps the worst offender. From the media pool playing along with Sarah Sanders during press conferences—conferences where Sanders openly lies and pisses on democracy—to access merchants like Maggie Haberman doling out Trump gossip like so many bread crumbs, too many reporters have been far too deferential to an administration that is brazenly racist, dysfunctional, and corrupt.

…the only end goal of their access is continued access, to preserve it indefinitely so that the copy spigot never gets shut off. They are abiding by traditional wink-wink understandings that have long existed between the government and the press covering it.

Journalists have been complicit in the fall of US democracy, and in particular have been complicit in the rise of Trump to the top of a farcical administration.

Wolff may be a sleazeball journalist but he has done what others weren’t prepared to do, and has out-sleazed Trump.

But Wolff didn’t do that. He did not engage in some endless bullshit access tango. No, Wolff actually USED his access, and extended zero courtesy to Trump on the process, and it’s going to pay off for him not just from a book sales standpoint, but from a real journalistic impact.

Ironically a gutter journalist has been prepared and able to blow the lid on the gutter that politics has become.

I am utterly sick to death of hearing anonymous reports about people inside the White House “concerned” about the madman currently in charge of everything. These people don’t deserve the courtesy of discretion. They don’t deserve to dictate the terms of coverage to people. They deserve to be torched.

Scathing of the establishment political media.

Trump ascended into power in part because he relied on other people being too nice. It’s fun to rampage through the china shop when the china shop owner is standing over there being like, “SIR, that is not how we do things here!”

If Trump refuses to abide by the standard (and now useless) “norms” of the presidency—shit, if he doesn’t even KNOW them—why should ANYONE in the press adhere to needless norms of their own?

They shouldn’t, and it appears that Michael Wolff was one of the few people to instinctively grasp that, and I hope more White House insiders follow his lead. Sometimes you need a rat to catch a rat.

A genius rat? Outsmarted.

David Remnick: The Increasing Unfitness of Donald Trump

What made the Emperor Nero tick, Suetonius writes in “Lives of the Caesars,” was “a longing for immortality and undying fame, though it was ill-regulated.”

Chaotic, corrupt, incurious, infantile, grandiose, and obsessed with gaudy real estate, Donald Trump is of a Neronic temperament. He has always craved attention. Now the whole world is his audience. In earlier times, Trump cultivated, among others, the proprietors and editors of the New York tabloids, Fox News, TMZ, and the National Enquirer. Now Twitter is his principal outlet, with no mediation necessary.

Future scholars will sift through Trump’s digital proclamations the way we now read the chroniclers of Nero’s Rome—to understand how an unhinged emperor can make a mockery of republican institutions, undo the collective nervous system of a country, and degrade the whole of public life.

Twitter may have allowed Trump to bypass, manipulate and torment the established media, but it has also left a trail of evidence, or perhaps more like an eight lane highway of evidence, of his unhinging.

…there is little doubt about who Donald Trump is, the harm he has done already, and the greater harm he threatens. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less the highest in the land.

This is not merely an orthodoxy of the opposition; his panicked courtiers have been leaking word of it from his first weeks in office.

The President of the United States has become a leading security threat to the United States.

But what can be done about it?

It seems all the world can do is watch has Trump and his presidency goes off the rails – and drags US credibility down with him.

Wolff may have a questionable reputation as a journalist, but he may have ultimately forced the United States of America to face up to the problem it has with it’s current president.

I know that some will still staunchly praise and defend Trump, but it’s likely that Wolff’s book will encourage more to look beyond the bull and Twitter and see Trump as he increasingly looks, an incompetent buffoon who managed to achieve some things, but whose negatives are too glaring and risky to keep sweeping under the White House carpet.