A dinner of clams and Arctic char at Michael Wolff’s Greenwich Village home set the stage for a book that – in the author’s own estimation – has become “an international political event”.
Among the guests were former chairman of Fox News Roger Ailes, expelled from the Murdoch empire over claims of sexual harassment and about to retire to Palm Beach, and Steve Bannon, the would-be inheritor of Ailes’ rightwing political media crown who barely six weeks earlier had orchestrated Donald Trump’s improbable election victory.
“It was six months since Roger had been thrown out of Fox so it wasn’t about having a powerful person here, just the opposite,” Wolff told the Guardian from a low-slung chair by the fireplace in his study. Bannon’s invite came next. “I asked him on the spur of the moment: ‘Roger is coming for dinner. Do you want to come?’”
As the storm generated by Wolff’s Fire and Fury has swept over Trump, Bannon and the White House, Wolff has wondered if Ailes vouched for him that night in January 2017, perhaps over the baba au rhum dessert, even as the torch of populist Republicanism was passed from one man to the other.
“I’ve often thought this is a possible thing that happened,” Wolff said.
Either way, it is the creation story of a book that demolished any illusions about Donald Trump’s improbable White House.
The book’s immediate effects have been well-described elsewhere. Among them, the immolation of Bannon’s relationship with Trump and his Breitbart paymasters, and Trump’s bizarre efforts to demonstrate mental competence that, as reported by Wolff, his aides and inner circle routinely and openly called into question.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
