Last year, after Michael Wolff published Fire and Fury, the epic, sales-smashing, unforgiving gossip-dump depicting the can’t-make-this-stuff-up chaos and disarray of the Trump administration, the conventional wisdom was that Wolff wouldn’t be able to pull off another White House tell-all. Fire and Fury, which has reportedly sold more than 4 million copies to date, was simply too down-and-dirty, too explosive, too scandalous for any sources to be willing to talk to Wolff again. Surely he’d burned all of his bridges, the thinking went.
Apparently not. As Axios recently reported, Wolff interviewed some 150 people for the Fire and Fury sequel—out June 4 from Henry Holt—more than two-thirds of whom were repeat customers. (Former senior officials, Trump pals, etc.) And once again, the dirt is abundant. Donald Trump insults everyone in his orbit, repeatedly, viciously, and—always privately—they return the favor.
“I can’t get the asshole off the phone,” Rupert Murdoch once said of Trump, “holding out the phone as the president’s voice rambled into the air,” according to Wolff. The same section of the book details tensions between Rupert and James Murdoch, resulting from the latter’s disgust over the Fox News prime-time lineup, namely Sean Hannity. “Father and son had screaming fights over Hannity and Trump,” Wolff writes in Siege, a copy of which I got my hands on a few days ago. “The Murdoch family had become collaborators, declared the younger Murdoch. The world would remember. The future of their company was at stake.” Wolff also writes, of Hannity, that the 9 P.M. anchor’s “cheerleading had begun to wear thin, and Trump started to turn on him. . . . For all of Hannity’s flattery, for all of his zealous commitment to the president, Trump, in almost equal proportion, had become disdainful of him. This was partly standard practice. Sooner or later, Trump felt contempt for anyone who showed him too much devotion.” (A spokesman for Rupert Murdoch didn’t immediately have a comment Wednesday morning. Through a spokeswoman, James Murdoch declined to comment. Hannity, through a spokeswoman, reiterated a previous statement about his interactions with Trump: “Nobody has ever gotten my relationship with Donald Trump right, ever.”)
At 315 pages, Siege is overflowing with such titillating material, which is sure to make it another tour de force for the Trump resistance, while inviting dismissive barbs from an administration that will presumably seek to portray the tome as the corrosive mudslinging of a fabulist—one who, it is worth noting, was given extensive, arguably unprecedented access to the West Wing and its top officials when he was working on Fire and Fury two years ago. Wolff will also presumably weather further criticism from his naysayers in the journalism community, who would argue that he plays loose and fast with opaquely sourced, uncorroborated rumors. And Steve Bannon is once again at the center of this book, though he’s no longer at the center of the West Wing, much as he aspires to be. He’s a kind of co-narrator.
“Michael Wolff’s first book was destroyed for its countless inaccuracies, made up accounts, and use of shady sources with personal political agendas that even the author himself admitted to,” said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley. “This latest book is just another attempt by Wolff to line his own pockets by pushing lies and pure fantasy aimed at attacking the President.”
Wolff’s book began making headlines a week before its publication, when its most incendiary revelations leaked out via The Guardian: Robert Mueller’s team, at the urging of top special-counsel prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, drew up a three-count obstruction-of-justice indictment last year, only to back off because of fears that Trump might do something rash like shut down the Russia probe. “As much as Andrew Weissmann wanted to indict the president, Bob Mueller wanted to stay in business,” Wolff writes.
In a firm denial, special-counsel spokesman Peter Carr told The Guardian that draft indictment documents “do not exist.” But in the book, Wolff describes them in detail, and Guardian correspondent Edward Helmore indicates in his story that he viewed them as well. Are readers to believe that someone shopped Wolff bogus docs? That Carr is obfuscating? Or that, certainly, there must be some middle-ground truth to account for the glaring discrepancy? These are all intriguing questions.
Beyond the Mueller heat, there are many other details that will fire up the chattering classes. In a chapter about Jamal Khashoggi, for instance, Wolff reports that Jared Kushner, in an off-the-record conversation with a reporter, remarked of the murdered Saudi Arabian dissident and newspaper columnist, “This guy was the link between certain factions in the royal family and Osama. We know that. A journalist? Come on. This was a terrorist masquerading as a journalist.” (A spokesman for Kushner, Avi Berkowitz, said, "Michael Wolff never reached out for comment and the statements in the book attributed to Jared we have seen in the media are completely false.")
Wolff offers a new take on the infamous “catch-and-kill” exercise in which David Pecker’s National Enquirer, working with Michael Cohen—and edited by Dylan Howard at the time—paid $150,000 for former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story of allegedly having an affair with Trump. “McDougal,” Wolff writes, “was not willing to share evidence [of the affair.] Her phone, theoretically with texts from Trump, was in storage. The friends in whom she had confided were unavailable. Her receipts were lost. In other words, there just wasn’t enough solid material for a story. . . . [To] Howard, quite an expert in scandal, there did not seem to be the necessary elements for a credible takedown. Was this, Howard wondered to friends, a Cohen and Pecker setup? Were Cohen and Pecker, each in a perpetually subservient and unrequited relationship with Trump, in cahoots to increase their standing or leverage with Trump?”
When Howard played ball with prosecutors in exchange for partial immunity in their probe of the payout, according to Wolff, he was shown an email in which Pecker said, “Dylan doesn’t know about this.” Someone who was in the room told Wolff that Howard “broke down in tears, realizing then that he had likely been a hapless instrument of Pecker and Cohen trying to please or manipulate Donald Trump.” (A spokesman for The National Enquirer declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Cohen didn’t immediately have a comment. McDougal could not be reached.)
Wolff also revisits one of his earlier book’s biggest controversies. While promoting Fire and Fury in early 2018, during an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, Wolff plugged a blind item that he’d slipped into the book, and he encouraged viewers to “read between the lines.” The carefully worded passage in one of the final chapters seemed to suggest Trump was having an affair with Nikki Haley, his then-United Nations ambassador. Haley went public, furiously rebutting the rumor—“highly offensive”; “disgusting”—and Wolff was roundly criticized for what many saw as an unwarranted smear. In Siege, he supplies an explanation for how the Trump–Haley chatter might have gotten going in the first place—as an idle and not particularly believable Trump boast about a sexual liaison: “What was true here is that this was what he had said; it was a species of his famous locker-room talk. What was far from certain was that what he had said was true, and few around him gave it much credence.” (Haley’s spokeswoman didn’t immediately return emailed requests for comment.)
The rollout of Fire and Fury was clouded by the attention given to a number of arguably small but not-insignificant factual errors, which would seem to portend intense scrutiny of Wolff’s every last word once Siege hits shelves. In the acknowledgments, Wolff says he used two research assistants, a fact-checker, and someone “who checked the check.” (Fun fact: that person is the journalist Chris de Kretser, an Australian News Corp. veteran and the father of Wolff’s friend and former research assistant, Leela de Kretser.)
Wolff also expresses strong gratitude to Bannon, who lost his White House gig in the wake of comments that he made in Fire and Fury, describing as “treasonous” Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russian operatives. Despite the professional consequences, Bannon continued to be a key source for Wolff. “Donald Trump’s wrath helped cost Bannon the backing of his patrons, billionaire Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, and forced his departure from Breitbart News,” Wolff writes. “It is a measure of Bannon’s character that he stood by his remarks in Fire and Fury without complaint, quibbles, or hurt feelings. In all my years in this business, I have encountered few sources who, after revealing themselves, didn’t blame the person who exposed them.”
Of the many other people who helped shape the narrative of Siege, Wolff writes, “Dealing with sources in the Trump White House has continued to offer its own unique set of issues. A basic requirement of working there is, surely, the willingness to infinitely rationalize or delegitimize the truth, and, when necessary, to outright lie. In fact, I believe this has caused some of the same people who have undermined the public trust to become private truth-tellers.”
As one of those people—described by Wolff as a “staff member who has spent almost countless hours with the president”—put it: “I have never met anyone crazier than Donald Trump.”
This article has been updated.
