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 new book. 
 
 Editor’s Note: Author and Hollywood Reporter columnist Michael Wolff’s new 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. In advance of the Jan. 9 publication of the book, which Trump is already attacking, Wolff has written this extracted column about his time in the White House based on the reporting included in Fire and Fury. 
 
 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). After the election, I proposed to him 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. 
 
 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 — checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the "system," and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch. 
 
 The West Wing is configured in such a way that the anteroom is quite a thoroughfare — everybody passes by. Assistants — young women in the Trump uniform of short skirts, high boots, long and loose hair — as well as, in situation-comedy proximity, all the new stars of the show: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Jared Kushner, Mike Pence, Gary Cohn, Michael Flynn (and after Flynn's abrupt departure less than a month into the job for his involvement in the Russia affair, his replacement, H.R. McMaster), all neatly accessible. 
 
 The nature of the comedy, it was soon clear, was that here was a group of ambitious men and women who had reached the pinnacle of power, a high-ranking White House appointment — with the punchline that Donald Trump was president. Their estimable accomplishment of getting to the West Wing risked at any moment becoming farce. 
 
 A new president typically surrounds himself with a small group of committed insiders and loyalists. But few on the Trump team knew him very well — most of his advisors had been with him only since the fall. Even his family, now closely gathered around him, seemed nonplussed. "You know, we never saw that much of him until he got the nomination," Eric Trump's wife, Lara, told one senior staffer. If much of the country was incredulous, his staff, trying to cement their poker faces, were at least as confused. 
 
 Their initial response was to hawkishly defend him — he demanded it — and by defending him they seemed to be defending themselves. Politics is a game, of course, of determined role-playing, but the difficulties of staying in character in the Trump White House became evident almost from the first day. 
 
 "You can't make this shit up," Sean Spicer, soon to be portrayed as the most hapless man in America, muttered to himself after his tortured press briefing on the first day of the new administration, when he was called to justify the president's inaugural crowd numbers — and soon enough, he adopted this as a personal mantra. Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, had, shortly after the announcement of his appointment in November, started to think he would not last until the inauguration. Then, making it to the White House, he hoped he could last a respectable year, but he quickly scaled back his goal to six months. Kellyanne Conway, who would put a finger-gun to her head in private about Trump's public comments, continued to mount an implacable defense on cable television, until she was pulled off the air by others in the White House who, however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic. (Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway's fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.) 
 
 Steve Bannon tried to gamely suggest that Trump was mere front man and that he, with plan and purpose and intellect, was, more reasonably, running the show — commanding a whiteboard of policies and initiatives that he claimed to have assembled from Trump's off-the-cuff ramblings and utterances. His adoption of the Saturday Night Live sobriquet "President Bannon" was less than entirely humorous. Within the first few weeks, even rote conversations with senior staff trying to explain the new White House's policies and positions would turn into a body-language ballet of eye-rolling and shrugs and pantomime of jaws dropping. Leaking became the political manifestation of the don't-blame-me eye roll. 
 
 The surreal sense of the Trump presidency was being lived as intensely inside the White House as out. Trump was, for the people closest to him, the ultimate enigma. He had been elected president, that through-the-eye-of-the-needle feat, but obviously, he was yet … Trump. Indeed, he seemed as confused as anyone to find himself in the White House, even attempting to barricade himself into his bedroom with his own lock over the protests of the Secret Service. 
 
 There was some effort to ascribe to Trump magical powers. In an early conversation — half comic, half desperate — Bannon tried to explain him as having a particular kind of Jungian brilliance. Trump, obviously without having read Jung, somehow had access to the collective unconscious of the other half of the country, and, too, a gift for inventing archetypes: Little Marco … Low-Energy Jeb … the Failing New York Times. Everybody in the West Wing tried, with some panic, to explain him, and, sheepishly, their own reason for being here. He's intuitive, he gets it, he has a mind-meld with his base. But there was palpable relief, of an Emperor's New Clothes sort, when longtime Trump staffer Sam Nunberg — fired by Trump during the campaign but credited with knowing him better than anyone else — came back into the fold and said, widely, "He's just a fucking fool." 
 
 Part of that foolishness was his inability to deal with his own family. In a way, this gave him a human dimension. Even Donald Trump couldn't say no to his kids. "It's a littleee, littleee complicated …" he explained to Priebus about why he needed to give his daughter and son-in-law official jobs. But the effect of their leadership roles was to compound his own boundless inexperience in Washington, creating from the outset frustration and then disbelief and then rage on the part of the professionals in his employ. 
 
 The men and women of the West Wing, for all that the media was ridiculing them, actually felt they had a responsibility to the country. "Trump," said one senior Republican, "turned selfish careerists into patriots." Their job was to maintain the pretense of relative sanity, even as each individually came to the conclusion that, in generous terms, it was insane to think you could run a White House without experience, organizational structure or a real purpose. 
 
 On March 30, after the collapse of the health care bill, 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff, the effective administration chief of the West Wing, a stalwart political pro and stellar example of governing craft, walked out. Little more than two months in, she quit. Couldn't take it anymore. Nutso. To lose your deputy chief of staff at the get-go would be a sign of crisis in any other administration, but inside an obviously exploding one it was hardly noticed. 
 
 While there might be a scary national movement of Trumpers, the reality in the White House was stranger still: There was Jared and Ivanka, Democrats; there was Priebus, a mainstream Republican; and there was Bannon, whose reasonable claim to be the one person actually representing Trumpism so infuriated Trump that Bannon was hopelessly sidelined by April. "How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me? Zero! Zero!" Trump muttered and stormed. To say that no one was in charge, that there were no guiding principles, not even a working org chart, would again be an understatement. "What do these people do?" asked everyone pretty much of everyone else. 
 
 The competition to take charge, which, because each side represented an inimical position to the other, became not so much a struggle for leadership, but a near-violent factional war. Jared and Ivanka were against Priebus and Bannon, trying to push both men out. Bannon was against Jared and Ivanka and Priebus, practicing what everybody thought were dark arts against them. Priebus, everybody's punching bag, just tried to survive another day. By late spring, the larger political landscape seemed to become almost irrelevant, with everyone focused on the more lethal battles within the White House itself. This included screaming fights in the halls and in front of a bemused Trump in the Oval Office (when he was not the one screaming himself), together with leaks about what Russians your opponents might have been talking to. 
 
 Reigning over all of this was Trump, enigma, cipher and disruptor. How to get along with Trump — who veered between a kind of blissed-out pleasure of being in the Oval Office and a deep, childish frustration that he couldn't have what he wanted? Here was a man singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on Fox & Friends or an Oval Office photo opp. "I want a win. I want a win. Where's my win?" he would regularly declaim. He was, in words used by almost every member of the senior staff on repeated occasions, "like a child." A chronic naysayer, Trump himself stoked constant discord with his daily after-dinner phone calls to his billionaire friends about the disloyalty and incompetence around him. His billionaire friends then shared this with their billionaire friends, creating the endless leaks which the president so furiously railed against. 
 
 One of these frequent callers was Rupert Murdoch, who before the election had only ever expressed contempt for Trump. Now Murdoch constantly sought him out, but to his own colleagues, friends and family, continued to derisively ridicule Trump: "What a fucking moron," said Murdoch after one call. 
 
 With the Comey firing, the Mueller appointment and murderous White House infighting, by early summer Bannon was engaged in an uninterrupted monologue directed to almost anyone who would listen. It was so caustic, so scabrous and so hilarious that it might form one of the great underground political treatises. 
 
 By July, Jared and Ivanka, who had, in less than six months, traversed from socialite couple to royal family to the most powerful people in the world, were now engaged in a desperate dance to save themselves, which mostly involved blaming Trump himself. It was all his idea to fire Comey! "The daughter," Bannon declared, "will bring down the father." 
 
 Priebus and Spicer were merely counting down to the day — and every day seemed to promise it would be the next day — when they would be out. 
 
 And, indeed, suddenly there were the 11 days of Anthony Scaramucci. 
 
 Scaramucci, a minor figure in the New York financial world, and quite a ridiculous one, had overnight become Jared and Ivanka's solution to all of the White House's management and messaging problems. After all, explained the couple, he was good on television and he was from New York — he knew their world. In effect, the couple had hired Scaramucci — as preposterous a hire in West Wing annals as any — to replace Priebus and Bannon and take over running the White House. 
 
 There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump's family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind. 
 
 Most succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia "collusion," Trump, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation, nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.) 
 
 There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he'd repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn't stop saying something. 
 
 By summer's end, in something of a historic sweep — more usual for the end of a president's first term than the end of his first six months — almost the entire senior staff, save Trump's family, had been washed out: Michael Flynn, Katie Walsh, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon. Even Trump's loyal, longtime body guard Keith Schiller — for reasons darkly whispered about in the West Wing — was out. Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Rick Dearborn, all on their way out. The president, on the spur of the moment, appointed John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and head of homeland security, chief of staff — without Kelly having been informed of his own appointment beforehand. Grim and stoic, accepting that he could not control the president, Kelly seemed compelled by a sense of duty to be, in case of disaster, the adult in the room who might, if needed, stand up to the president … if that is comfort. 
 
 As telling, with his daughter and son-in-law sidelined by their legal problems, Hope Hicks, Trump's 29-year-old personal aide and confidant, became, practically speaking, his most powerful White House advisor. (With Melania a nonpresence, the staff referred to Ivanka as the "real wife" and Hicks as the "real daughter.") Hicks' primary function was to tend to the Trump ego, to reassure him, to protect him, to buffer him, to soothe him. It was Hicks who, attentive to his lapses and repetitions, urged him to forgo an interview that was set to open the 60 Minutes fall season. Instead, the interview went to Fox News' Sean Hannity who, White House insiders happily explained, was willing to supply the questions beforehand. Indeed, the plan was to have all interviewers going forward provide the questions. 
 
 As the first year wound down, Trump finally got a bill to sign. The tax bill, his singular accomplishment, was, arguably, quite a reversal of his populist promises, and confirmation of what Mitch McConnell had seen early on as the silver Trump lining: "He'll sign anything we put in front of him." With new bravado, he was encouraging partisans like Fox News to pursue an anti-Mueller campaign on his behalf. Insiders believed that the only thing saving Mueller from being fired, and the government of the United States from unfathomable implosion, is Trump's inability to grasp how much Mueller had on him and his family. 
 
 Steve Bannon was openly handicapping a 33.3 percent chance of impeachment, a 33.3 percent chance of resignation in the shadow of the 25th amendment and a 33.3 percent chance that he might limp to the finish line on the strength of liberal arrogance and weakness. 
 
 Donald Trump's small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would — or, in many cases, should — have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country's future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job. 
 
 At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends. 
 
 Happy first anniversary of the Trump administration. ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders explains why Mr Trump rounded on his former adviser Steve Bannon 
 
 US President Donald Trump's lawyers have written to his former strategist Steve Bannon, saying he has violated a non-disclosure agreement. 
 
 The cease-and-desist notice accuses Mr Bannon of defaming the president in speaking to author Michael Wolff. 
 
 Wolff's forthcoming tell-all book makes several startling claims, and questions Mr Trump's fitness for office. 
 
 The president responded by saying Mr Bannon had "lost his mind" after losing his White House position. 
 
 His lawyers said Mr Bannon had broken his employment agreement by speaking to Wolff about Mr Trump, his family and the campaign, "disclosing confidential information" and "making disparaging statements and in some cases outright defamatory statements". 
 
 On his radio show on Wednesday, Mr Bannon responded to the president's criticism by saying he was a "great man". 
 
 "You know, I support him day in and day out," he said on the show produced by right-wing Breitbart News, which he heads. 
 
 The book is reportedly based on more than 200 interviews. 
 
 On Thursday, the Hollywood Reporter published Wolff's behind-the-scenes account. He concluded that everyone he had spoken to was in agreement in their view on Mr Trump: "They all - 100 percent - came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job". 
 
 What's in the book? 
 
 Image copyright AFP / Getty Image caption Melania and Ivanka Trump feature in various stories 
 
 Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House makes many explosive claims, including that: 
 
 Mr Bannon thought a meeting between Donald Trump Jr and a group of Russians was "treasonous" 
 
 The Trump team was shocked and horrified by his election win 
 
 His wife, Melania, was in tears on election night 
 
 Mr Trump was angry that A-list stars had snubbed his inauguration 
 
 The new president "found the White House to be vexing and even a little scary" 
 
 His daughter, Ivanka, had a plan with her husband, Jared Kushner, that she would be "the first woman president" 
 
 Ivanka Trump mocked her dad's "comb-over" hairstyle and "often described the mechanics behind it to friends" 
 
 11 explosive claims from new Trump book 
 
 It also alleges that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair told Mr Trump during a meeting last February that the British intelligence services may have been spying on him and his campaign, according to a report in The Times newspaper. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Tony Blair says a claim he warned Donald Trump's aides UK spied is a 'complete fabrication' 
 
 The Times says Mr Blair was hoping to get a job advising Mr Trump on the Middle East. 
 
 Mr Blair told the BBC Today programme the story was "complete fabrication, from beginning to end". He said he had discussed the Middle East peace process with Mr Kushner but denied angling for work. 
 
 Who is Michael Wolff? 
 
 The 64-year-old writer is a former columnist for New York magazine and Vanity Fair. 
 
 Image copyright Alamy Image caption Michael Wolff has written a number of books about the media 
 
 According to New York magazine, which first published the extracts, Wolff was able to exploit the Trump administration's political inexperience to gain an unusual amount of insight. 
 
 Wolff said he was able to take up "something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing" following the president's inauguration. 
 
 However, some of the book's excerpts have already been criticised and questioned. The Washington Post said Wolff was a "provocateur and media polemicist", and that his reporting had been questioned before. 
 
 More on the author of the explosive Trump book 
 
 How has the Trump administration defended itself? 
 
 "Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency," Mr Trump said in a statement on Wednesday. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Steve Bannon's three goals for the Trump presidency 
 
 Press secretary Sarah Sanders dismissed the book as a "trashy tabloid fiction" that she said was "filled with false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access or influence with the White House". 
 
 A spokesperson for Melania Trump said the First Lady had encouraged her husband's presidential bid. "She was confident he would win and was very happy when he did," she said on Wednesday. 
 
 What's being said in Bannon's defence? 
 
 Aside from the radio comment, Mr Bannon has not spoken publicly about the book, the president's comments or the legal action. 
 
 However, in an interview with BBC Newsnight, Raheem Kassam - UK editor of Breitbart News - said the Wolff interviews could have been taken out of context. 
 
 He also said Mr Bannon was well-placed to comment on the Russia controversy, having served in the US Navy. 
 
 "He understands what the geopolitical threat is..." said Mr Kassam. "So when he remarks that these people shouldn't probably have been in Trump Tower taking meetings with senior campaign staff without lawyers in the room, I would say that is a fair thing to say." 
 
 An inevitable break-up 
 
 Anthony Zurcher, BBC News, Washington 
 
 Donald Trump swept to the presidency in part on the back of Steve Bannon and his Breitbart conservative media empire. Now we will see how he fares when he is at war with them. 
 
 The president's blistering reply to Mr Bannon's comments appears to indicate that the bridge between the politician and his ideological spirit guide has been reduced to cinders. But how will Mr Trump's legion of supporters react? It is never wise to underestimate their dedication to the man himself, above all else. 
 
 No matter the outcome of this coming battle, this has to be viewed as a devastating failure for Mr Bannon personally. After spending years advocating for an anti-establishment conservative populism, he finally had a seat in the halls of power. He said in early 2017 that his goal was nothing short of the "deconstruction of the administrative state". 
 
 Now he is on the outside again, besieged by long-time antagonists and former allies. His president recently signed a tax bill embraced by corporate interests. His first post-2016 foray into elective politics, the Alabama Senate race, ended in humiliating defeat. 
 
 Perhaps, given all this, the Bannon-Trump feud was as inevitable as it is certain to be vicious. ||||| File this one under “not a surprise.” 
 
 Michael Wolff predicts a bleak future for Donald Trump — and the media. 
 
 The “Fire & Fury” author predicted before a packed house at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Monday morning that President Trump will be ousted from the White House in short order. 
 
 “We will soon find ourselves in the mother of all constitutional crises … When [Vice President] Mike Pence becomes president, which I believe that he will become, the media business goes into a deep depression,” Wolff said. “Mike Pence is literally the most boring person on Earth. He’s faceless.” 
 
 A nonchalant Wolff delivered the news, while basking in the success of his colorful, bestselling book that describes Trump’s dysfunctional White House. 
 
 The book has sold over 2 million hard copies in the US since its Jan. 5 release — plus millions of e-copies. 
 
 Wolff’s explosive book’s rise was meteoric. On Jan. 4, the day that The Guardian leaked excerpts from “Fire & Fury,” Wolff saw pre-sales of his book skyrocket to No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller’s list within hours. Soon after, the White House sent a cease-and-desist letter, which boosted sales even higher. 
 
 Wolff has since cashed in on what he called the “aberrant entertainment” that is the Trump presidency, and will soon see his book turned into a 10-part television series directed by Jay Roach. He is also planning on penning a sequel, according to reports. 
 
 “Once a day, I cast my eyes heavenward and say, ‘Thank God for Donald Trump,’” the journalist said. 
 
 Despite the massive success, Wolff threw a few jabs at his competitors, who have questioned the accuracy of the gossipy tome. 
 
 “The press corps over there, the Washington political reporters, they do a different thing than I do,” he said with a touch of arrogance. “They are all very resentful that I got this story and I made all this money.” 
 
 What Wolff did was observe the administration at work for seven months. 
 
 “I never asked a question beyond, ‘How’s it going?,’” he said. “It’s an older style of reporting.” 
 
 To be sure, there were plenty of errors in the book — which sparked a lot of the pushback. 
 
 Wolff didn’t leave Cannes’ main stage before getting in a jab at the New York Times for its scoop that the president threatened to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, who is heading the investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties. 
 
 “Every day he tried to fire Mueller. He did this constantly, to virtually everyone,” Wolff said smugly. “So the Times story was not wrong, but the Times story missed that fact.”
– The quotes are so incendiary that some are questioning their veracity. But Axios reports Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House author Michael Wolff has "dozens of hours" of tapes to back up statements that appear in the book. And in an excerpt running in the Hollywood Reporter, Wolff (who is the co-founder of Newser) explains just how he got access to them. A June 2016 Hollywood Reporter article may have helped grease things: Hope Hicks emailed Wolff to say Trump was pleased with the cover. Post-election, Wolff says he floated the idea of him coming to the White House "journalistically, as a fly on the wall" to gather information for a future book. Trump seemed disinterested in the idea of a book, but "his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around," writes Wolff. And so Wolff writes he spent each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, scheduled appointments with senior staffers, and "plunk[ed] myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch." The excerpt shares other tidbits—how the Secret Service protested the president's attempts to lock himself in his bedroom; how Trump's post-dinner calls to billionaire pals spurred leaks; how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump thought Anthony Scaramucci would be the White House's saving grace—which Trump's lawyer is now trying to block from release. The Washington Post reports Wolff and his publisher, Henry Holt and Co., have been sent a letter that demands they "immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release, or dissemination of the book" or any excerpts; the lawyer also wants a copy and says a libel suit is being considered.