My year inside Trump's crazy White House

Michael Wolff, 1/4/18; Seth Auberon,  Pfc. Sandoval, Crystal Q. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

"You can’t make this sh*t up": My year inside Trump's insane White House

"Ballcap Semiotics" (jensorensen.com)

Author and columnist Michael Wolff was given extraordinary access to the Trump administration and now details the feuds, the fights, and the alarming chaos he witnessed while reporting what turned into a book.

I interviewed Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked — or not disliked — the piece I wrote. "Great cover!" his press assistant, Hope Hicks, emailed me after it came out. (It was a picture of a belligerent Trump in mirrored sunglasses).

A book? What the hell for? Go ahead.

After the election, I proposed to Trump that I come to the White House and report an inside story for later publication — journalistically, as a fly on the wall — which he seemed to misconstrue as a request for a job.

No, I said. I'd like to just watch and write a book. "A book?" he responded, losing interest. "I hear a lot of people want to write books," he added, clearly not understanding why anybody would. "Do you know Ed Klein?" — author of several virulently anti-Hillary books. "Great guy. I think he should write a book about me." But sure, Trump seemed to say, knock yourself out.

• Need subversive Trump art? (Small Hands Big Dictator)

I didn't say these things I said, he says I said!

Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around.

I would check in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, make appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the "system," and then wander across the street to the White House and plunk myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch. More

Smokey the Bear: "It's climate change, you idiot!" (Hall/SHBD)

One way or the other, I'm building my wall, even if I have to take Lady Liberty out.

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This is real. I may glue it on, but it's real.

Editor’s Note: Author and Hollywood Reporter columnist Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt & Co.), is a detailed account of the 45th president’s election and first year in office based on extensive access to the White House and more than 200 interviews with Trump and senior staff over a period of 18 months. Trump attacked before publication. Wolff has written this extracted column about his time in the White House based on the reporting included in Fire and Fury.