Into election day. And we start with a reminder that nobody actually thought Trump would win: his close adviser Kellyanne Conway, for instance, is reported to have spent all day ringing around the many TV producers she'd befriended selling herself and casting off blame for the inevitable defeat she was about to suffer. She blamed the Republican party, first, then moved on.
Secondly, she had attempted to show how she had done a surprisingly good job – by managing to at least bring someone seen as the worst candidate in history within a chance of winning.
The agreement wasn't just that Trump wouldn't win but that he
shouldn't win, writes Wolff. It was helpful that enough people didn't think it would happen to actually have to deal with the fallout if it did.
Even Trump wasn't clear about the fact that he actually wanted to be president, according to the book. He was already looking forward to his plans for a Trump TV network and other ventures. And he was getting ready to claim that the election had been stolen from him, and that's why he would lose.
Trump believed that everyone around him was an idiot and that his own campaign was "crappy". He also thought that the Clinton campaign had all the "best" people, Wolff claims.
He was so unsure of his own campaign that he even refused to donate money to it, Wolff reports. He billed himself as a billionaire throughout the campaign, but the best he could do was lend $10 million on the promise that he'd get it back when they raised more money, and the finance chairman Steve Mnuchin had to collect the loan to ensure Trump didn't forget.
Indeed, the only person who believed Trump would win was Steve Bannon. But since people thought he was "crazy Steve", that did the opposite of reassuring them, says Wolff.
Wolff moves on to discussing Trump's marriage to Melania, something that was "perplexing to almost everybody around him". They could go for days without talking, even if they were both in Trump tower. She might not even know which house he was in, and didn't seem to care. And she wasn't very interested in his business, either.
But he still talked about her a lot, and it's not wrong to call their relationship a marriage in name only, claims Wolff. He would discuss and admire her looks, even when other people were there, and he bragged sincerely about the fact that she was a "trophy wife". And he wanted her approval, including for his bid for president.
She gave it, even though she was one of the few people who thought he might actually win. That was a terrifying thought for her she didn't want to lose her "carefully sheltered life", which kept her not only from the glare of the press but from the rest of the extended Trump family, and allowed her to focus on raising her son Barron.
The Billy Bush tape – in which Trump boasted about "grabbing [women] by the pussy" – was an embarrassment for Melania Trump, too. The silver lining was that at least her husband wouldn't become president, jokes Wolff, and idea that even Trump himself encouraged to her when she was upset about his run.
The picture the book paints of Trump Tower on election night is a fairly desperate and depressing one – but only when it became clear that Trump was going to win. The whole campaign was set up so that it would win by losing: they would avoid the potentially dangerous glare of the press that would come with a victory, and all of the big people in the movement had already set up their new jobs for afterwards. Trump, for instance, would be able to become the figurehead of a movement that would see him as the martyr of the crooked Clinton campaign.
When it became clear he was going to win, however, everything changed. Donald Jr looked "as if he had seen a ghost"; Melania "was in tears – and not of joy"; and Trump went from "befuddled" to "disbelieving" to "quite horrified", all in the space of an hour. And then he underwent the most dramatic change of all: into a "a man who believed that he deserved to be and was wholly capable of being the president of the United States".
Wolff moves on to Trump's character before he started thinking about running for president. And character is the right word: Wolff says that he speaks about himself in the third person, and was living life as a role in the same way Hulk Hogan does.
The book moves on to discuss rumours – apparently supported by people who knew him – that Trump had sex with his friends' wives.
But is that true? All that and more is addressed in this excellent piece by Adam Lusher, which looks at just how much of this book we can trust in.
14 days ago
(Just jumping out of the book here to say that if you want to heckle me, hurry me along, ask any questions or whatever else, then the best place to do it is probably on Twitter – where I'm
@_andrew_griffin.)
During the transition, Trump kept asking to have his family join the team. "In defiance of law and tone, and everybody's disbelieving looks, the president seemed intent on surrounding himself in the White House with his family." All of the Trumps would come, apart from Melania, he said, and would take on roles similar to those they had in the Trump Organization.
Nobody was there to stop him. That is, until famous Trump supporter and media personality Ann Coulter took him aside and said: "Nobody is apparently telling you this. But you can't. You just can't hire your children," Wolff writes.
But he continued to insist that he was able to call on his family's help. Eventually, he relented on his desire to have Jared Kushner as his chief-of-staff, but as we know many of the extended family of Trumps continue to occupy important places in the White House.
Donald Trump has claimed that the Billy Bush tape – a video that he appeared to initially recognise the legitimacy of – might actually be fake, according to both Wolff and numerous reports before the book came out too. He has suggested that the tape "really wasn't me", and when pressed whether he meant that it was unfair to judge him on a singular event, made clear that he meant that:
No, it wasn't me. I've been told by people who understand this stuff about how easy it is to alter these things and put in voices and completely different people.
Wolff doesn't name the friendly cable anchor that he claims Trump made those remarks too. But it is entirely in line with what he has been saying elsewhere –
something that led Access Hollywood to address the claims on air, during a segment where hosts made clear that they believed the tape was real and that the president had actually already apologised for the behaviour on it.
14 days ago
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...nnon-michael-wolff-ivanka-jared-a8143136.html