Author Michael Wolff in the Trump Tower lobby in New York on Jan. 12, 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Author Michael Wolff is out to rekindle the magic of January 2018. That was when his book on the Trump White House — “Fire and Fury” — channeled the misgivings of the entire Trump-resistance movement. Sales, cable news segments, posts by the Erik Wemple Blog — they all boomed.
Now Wolff has a second act: “Siege: Trump Under Fire.” Incendiary conditions this time, however, aren’t in place: For one, insider accounts of the Trump administration are everywhere, including in the 400-plus pages of the redacted report submitted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. For another, cable news may hesitate to bandwagon the new Wolff opus, in light of the factual errors and circus events surrounding “Fire and Fury.”
What’s driving publicity for “Siege,” then? A claim that Mueller’s team drew up a three-count indictment for obstruction against President Trump. It’s a whoa-if-true report that surfaced yesterday in a book preview in the Guardian. “The Guardian obtained a copy of Siege and viewed the documents concerned,” wrote Edward Helmore.
We could write several paragraphs weighing the evidence in favor of Wolff’s scoop. But a simple table of the evidence for and against Wolff’s claims is more appropriate:
* See New York Times, “White House Insider Account Has Feel of an Outside View, and Prompts a Mueller Denial”
Time won’t necessarily tell whether Wolff’s document is for real. After all: Heavily challenged stories relating to Trump and the Mueller report have a way of bumping along without definitive refutation or confirmation. What does seem likely is that the self-assured Wolff will boast of his exploits, as he did after his first book. “Suffice to say, my telling of the Trump story upended the daily drip-drip-drip of Trump news by making the Trump White House seem truer and more real than the standard Washington media playbook makes it seem,” wrote Wolff.
Read more:
Erik Wemple: What the Mueller report reveals about the media
Erik Wemple: More media lessons from the Mueller report
Joe Scarborough: I asked Trump a blunt question: Do you read?
