Michael Wolff inflicted immeasurable damage on the country and, like an idiot child proud of getting expelled from school, he’s still bragging about it.
After awkwardly retreating from TV interviews and the embarrassment of seeing all of his speaking tour canceled before it even began, you’d think Wolff would slither away for the rest of eternity.
Nope!
Under normal circumstances, Wolff would be unpublishable outside of Craigslist. But because he wrote a book of lies about President Trump, the Hollywood Reporter gave him substantial space on Wednesday to restate why it’s OK to be a con artist. (Wolff more kindly describes himself simply as a “writer.”)
“Not part of that bureaucracy — indeed without an employer — I slipped into the White House this past year and got a close-up look at a West Wing operating at historic levels of managerial and intellectual impairment,” wrote Wolff in defense of his sensational Fire and Fury book. “The book I wrote — seeing West Wing staffers not so much as part of a predictable political ecosystem but as people caught in an aberrant situation beyond their control and even grasp — was resonant with readers but was held in suspicious regard by various members of the Washington media.”
As extensively documented in my book Fraud and Fiction (available on Amazon), that’s not true. The Washington media fully glommed onto Wolff’s laughable account of the White House with sticky hands, boosting the book’s credibility for more than a month. It wasn’t until he claimed in media interviews that United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley was having an affair with Trump that Wolff finally had to endure serious scrutiny.
In his piece, Wolff gleefully recounts how he shuns “bureaucratic journalism” and that he very well may have lied his way into the White House (he did). “But, really, so what if I had, if that is the way to the real story?” he wrote.
He would have a point if he had gotten “the real story.” Instead, he made one up, based on impossible-to-understand, inconsistent sourcing.
And he most certainly lied to get his time in the White House, though at least he’s finally somewhat admitting it.
In the author’s note of his book, Wolff says he embarked on telling his dumb story having “accepted no rules nor having made any promises.”
Complete lie.
Here’s what Wolff actually said in an email to a Trump aide in requesting access to the newly elected president, according to CNN’s Michael Smerconish and not disputed by Wolff himself: “What I’m really after is not so much a policy or position interview with the president but an opportunity to humanize him. Honestly, I don’t think there is anybody out there who is doing this or it seems who cares about doing this but I think you know that I like him and I believe I can show him in a way that might actually change perceptions of him … I’m open to anything but the more relaxed the better.”
That doesn’t sound like someone who “accepted no rules” and made no “promises” about what he “might or might not write.” In fact, it sounds like the exact opposite. Wolff swindled the White House.
And after getting in, he wrote a fantastical story that the public would have never entertained had the national media not promoted it for weeks.
Wolff said in his book that Trump campaigned for the purpose of losing, on the ridiculous premise that it would make his brand more lucrative.
Trump’s key supporters were swing-state workers, most of whom have never set foot on a Trump golf course or stayed in one of his luxury hotels. It’s not as if he had tapped into a new market. If Trump had lost, those people weren’t about to jet off to a Trump winery. They can’t afford it.
If anything, his brand would have been permanently blackened by the defeat.
Wolff said in his book, and again in his new column, that Trump is suffering from some mental affliction. But Trump’s personal White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson (who was originally appointed by former President Barack Obama), spent an hour with reporters refuting that.
Wolff said White House adviser Stephen Miller is “militantly unread,” when every reporter in Washington knows Miller to be perhaps the most studied official in the West Wing.
The fantasies are endless in Wolff’s book, which would be retracted by the publisher if we weren’t living in a time where it’s perfectly acceptable to throw the nation into a crisis, so long as it makes money.
There’s one honest thing Wolff says in his Hollywood Reporter column. “My book, with its trove of Trump,” he writes, “became no longer a mere book but a seismic political event.”
True. Wolff now has a sick place in history, helped along by a national media eagerly pushing his fraud and fiction.
