Michael Wolff: No Stranger to Making Things Up!

Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House has been published. Quotes released pre-publication included unflattering descriptions of behavior by U.S. President Donald Trump, chaotic interactions among the White House senior staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. News of the book’s imminent publication and its embarrassing depiction of Trump prompted Trump’s lawyer to issue on January 4, 2018 a cease and desist letter and to threaten libel lawsuits against Wolff, his publisher Henry Holt and Company, and Bannon, an action that actually stimulated pre-launch book sales. According to legal experts and historians, threats of litigation by Trump as a sitting president against a book author and publisher are unprecedented, and challenge the freedom of speech protected by the U.S. First Amendment. Before its release on January 5, the book and e-book reached number one both on Amazon.com and the Apple iBooks Store. (source)

In the fall of 1998, Wolff published a book, Burn Rate, which recounted the details of the financing, positioning, personalities, and ultimate breakdown of Wolff’s start-up Internet company, Wolff New Media. The book became a bestseller. In its review of Wolff’s book Burn Rate, Brill’s Content criticized Wolff for “apparent factual errors” and said that 13 people, including subjects he mentioned, complained that Wolff had “invented or changed quotes”. (source)

In a 2004 cover story for The New Republic, Michelle Cottle wrote that Wolff was “uninterested in the working press,” preferring to focus on “the power players—the moguls” and was “fixated on culture, style, buzz, and money, money, money.” She also noted that “the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created—springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events.” Calling his writing “a whirlwind of flourishes and tangents and asides that often stray so far from the central point that you begin to wonder whether there is a central point.” (source)

This modus operandi is so ingrained in his style that even Wolff admits he can’t be sure if parts of his newest book are true.

The author of the explosive new Trump book says he can’t be sure if parts of it are true www.businessinsider.com An author’s note at the start of ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House’ makes clear Michael Wolff was not completely able to substantiate his account.

Make no mistake, many more books will be written about Donald Trump’s presidency. It really is too soon to launch any attempt at summarising things. It may go really good for him, as the trend seems to indicate, or he may go down in flames. Either way, we can be certain that Ann Coulter, who correctly predicted his win, has an ever expanding folder of facts and curious anecdotes to share when The Donald leaves the Oval Office. By the way, that tapping sound you may be hearing is likely Bill O’Reilly writing “Killing Trump.” Stop it Bill. Enough already.