text: Wolff on Media 
   
   At home in Beverly Hills, the candidate talks Murdoch, what he's reading, how he'll redo electoral math and Ari Emanuel's offer to script his convention. 
   
   The long day is ending for Donald Trump with a pint of vanilla Haagen-Dazs ice cream. We're settling in for a late-night chat at his Beverly Hills house, a 5,395-square-foot Colonial mansion directly across from the Beverly Hills Hotel. He's here for the final presidential primary, a California coronation of sorts, after rallies in Orange County (where violence broke out and seven people were arrested). He is, as he has been for much of our conversation — and perhaps much of the last year — marveling at his own campaign. "You looked outside before, you see what's going on," he boasts about the police surrounding his house, and the Secret Service detail cramming his garage and snaking around the pool at the center of the front drive. And he's just returned from a big donor fundraiser in Brentwood for the Republican Party at the home of Tom Barrack, the investor and former Miramax co-owner. "There had to be over a thousand policeman. They had a neighborhood roped off, four or five blocks away from this beautiful house. Machine guns all over the place." 
   
   One thing to understand about Trump is that, rather unexpectedly, he's neither angry nor combative. He may be the most threatening and frightening and menacing presidential candidate in modern life, and yet, in person he's almost soothing. His extreme self-satisfaction rubs off. He's a New Yorker who actually might be more at home in California (in fact, he says he usually comes to his home here — two buildings on Rodeo Drive — only once a year). Life is sunny. Trump is an optimist — at least about himself. He's in easy and relaxed form campaigning here in these final days before the June 7 California primary, even with Hillary Clinton's biggest backers and a city that is about half Latino surrounding him. 
   
   Earlier in the day, I'd met with Trump at a taping of ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live! at the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where he was the single guest for the evening (musicians The Weeknd and Belly canceled upon learning of his appearance). "Have you ever seen anything like this?" he asked. He meant this, the Trump phenomenon. Circumventing any chance that I might dampen the sentiment, he quickly answered his own question: "No one ever has." 
   
   His son-in-law, New York Observer owner Jared Kushner, married to his daughter Ivanka and also a real estate scion — but clearly a more modest and tempered fellow, a wisp next to his beefsteak father-in-law — offered that they may have reached 100 percent name recognition. In other words, Trump could be the most famous man in the world right now. "I may be," says Trump, almost philosophically, and referencing the many people who have told him they've never seen anything like this. "Bill O'Reilly said in his lifetime this is the greatest phenomenon he's ever seen." 
   
   That notion is what's at the center of this improbable campaign, its own brilliant success. It's its main subject — the one you can't argue with. You can argue about issues, but you can't argue with success. Hence, to Trump, you're really foolish to argue with the Trump campaign. "I've spent $50 million of my own money to go through the primaries. Other people spent $230 million and they came in last. You know what I'm saying?" And this provides him the reason to talk endlessly and repetitively about the phenomenon of the campaign. That phenomenon is, of course, Trump himself, about whom Trump spends a lot of time talking in the third person. 
   
   You can try, but it's hard to resist this admiration for himself. The certainty of it, the enthusiasm for it and the lack of not just doubt, but of any negativity. It's all upbeat and positive. The dark, scary, virulent heart of American politics is having the best time anyone has ever had. 
   
   Trump at a May 25 rally in Anaheim. Violent clashes between protesters and police followed him through California. 
   
   If onstage he calls people names, more privately he has only good, embracing things to say about almost everybody. (For most public people I know, it is the opposite.) He loves everybody. Genuinely seems to love everybody — at least everybody who's rich and successful (he doesn't really talk about anyone who isn't). Expressing love for everybody, for most of us, would clearly seem to be an act. But with Trump, it's the name-calling and bluster that might be the act. 
   
   I offer that there are quite a number of people in New York, some we know in common, who are puzzled that the generous, eager-to-be-liked and liking-everyone-in-return Donald has morphed into a snarling and reactionary public enemy, at least a liberal enemy. This, I suggest, might be a source of the continuing dialectic — or to some, wishful thinking — that he does not necessarily believe what he says. 
   
   I might detect the most mild sort of annoyance here. Trump says it's that he just never talked about his beliefs in the past — after all, he wasn't a politician. "Who thought this was going to happen?" But his larger point seems to be that such a topic — what he says — is a silly thing to focus on. The point is not about politics, or policies, but about how people, about how many people, have responded to him. It's too big to ignore the bigness. "You heard Jimmy announce tonight that I have the most votes in the history of the Republican Party," he says by way of explanation for the larger issues at hand — i.e., him. 
   
   In a way, what this evening's Kimmel show was about was treating Trump's positions as though they are, well, Trump's positions, qualitatively different than other politicians' positions. In fact, you might logically see the Kimmel show as a devastating attack on Trump's views and claims. Kimmel flat out doesn't believe him. That recording of the PR person alleged to be Trump sounding like a PR person? Trump: "It didn't sound like me." Kimmel: "No. Sounded like you." (An exchange repeated similarly several times, with no rancor from either Trump or Kimmel.) "And oh," says Kimmel, "remember when you liked Hillary?" Trump: "I just said I like her. I say I like everybody." And there was Kimmel, at every opportunity, happily mocking Trump, the overexposed media whore. 
   
   The effect is not only not damaging, it's fun-loving, comic, even joyous. Kimmel is tickled to have such a good sport to poke fun at, and Trump is tickled that Kimmel is tickled. Everybody's in on it. There are no phonies here. Or everybody here is honest about being a phony. Nobody is taking anyone very seriously — forget what might be at stake in a presidential election. If Trump is the subject of the conversation, then Trump is happy. If Kimmel has Trump as a guest, he's happy. Everybody's happy. (Trump has a staffer take a picture of another picture of Trump when he was previously on the Kimmel show that's now hanging on the studio wall.) 
   
   It is this media frisson that, with countless other professional and amateur analyzers, I'm trying to plumb. Surely a big part of the answer lies in the nature of Trump's performance, an unself-consciousness so extreme that he has passed through hurdles of humiliation that would have destroyed nearly all others to emerge as though free of a private self. Trump is only fully alive in public. But another aspect is that, differentiating himself from every other candidate, he has a long, intimate relationship with nearly every significant player in the media and, indeed, lavishes copious praise on almost all of them. He may know few people in Washington, and care about them less, but he knows his moguls and where they rank on the modern suck-up-to list. 
   
   On Murdoch: "Rupert is a tremendous guy. I think Rupert [who for several years lived in the Trump building on 59th and Park Avenue in Manhattan] is one of the people I really respect and like. And I think Rupert respects what I've done." But what about Murdoch's grumpy Trump tweets? "When I got into the world of politics, that was a different realm for me and maybe he felt differently. But I think he respects what I've done and he's a tremendous guy and I think we have a very good relationship." 
   
   On Redstone: "Sumner, well, he's had a good run. Good run. Terrible it comes to this, but a good run. He'd give me anything. Loved me." 
   
   On Leslie Moonves: "Great guy. The greatest. We're on the same page. We think alike." 
   
   These are the bulls of his real party. 
   
   The party whips, to strain this metaphor, are the news heads: Roger Ailes at Fox News, Jeff Zucker at CNN (who previously at NBC bought The Apprentice and launched Trump as a national TV star) and Andy Lack, now the head of NBC News. Despite his tweets about the "dishonest media," Trump is lavish in his praise of all of them. I ask him to rate them. "That's an unfair question," he says, making a rare grab for politesse. "I know Jeff very well. I know Roger very well. And, less well, but I think Andy has done a very good job." 
   
   Among his frequent media and now political confidants is WME co-CEO Ari Emanuel — whose brother, Rahm, the mayor of Chicago, was once Obama's chief of staff — whom Trump says has offered to take charge of the Trump celebratory convention film. Emanuel and Trump, while at seeming odds politically, might in fact be even better united in a kind of hyper salesmanship. "He's a very good friend of mine," says Trump. "He calls me a lot. I call him a lot and we talk. He's very political. Even though he's not political, he's political. He gets it. You're shocked to hear that, right? [About the movie.] But yeah, I might do something with Ari. Does he represent you?" 
   
   Sanders called a Trump win a "real danger to the entire world" on May 27. 
   
   Trump will turn 70 on June 14, but he shows no sign of fatigue even as our conversation drifts toward 11 p.m. He's been at this since either 4 a.m. or 6 a.m. (he offers different times at different moments). "Today, I'm up at six in the morning, I'm meeting some of the biggest people in the world. I then had to give a speech to a big group, then I had to give a speech at 12 to [Dole Food mogul] David Murdock, [real estate magnate] Donald Bren, tremendous guys. Then I had to drive to Anaheim and give a speech in front of thousands of people. Then I came back and did more meetings, then I did a fundraiser tonight, then I did Kimmel. And now you. You're not a two-minute interview guy." 
   
   He hands me a water bottle from the refrigerator (it only contains water and about a dozen pints of ice cream), and we walk through the dark house decorated with hotel-like furniture (a four-star rather than a five-star hotel lobby). He reclines, still in his standard boxy suit, tie slightly loosened, with his Haagen-Dazs on an overstuffed couch in the living room (he asks me not to put my water bottle on the fabric-covered ottoman). 
   
   If there's any pattern to his conversation, it's that he's vague on all subjects outside himself, his campaign and the media. Everything else is mere distraction. But I press him about Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who, earlier in the day, has admitted to funding the $140 million Hulk Hogan lawsuit against Gawker. Thiel also is his most prominent Silicon Valley backer and will go to the convention in July as a pledged delegate. But Trump needs reminding who he is, and then concludes he must be a friend of his son-in-law Jared. ("Wow, I love him! So he funded it for Hulk Hogan? You think Hulk Hogan would have enough money, but he probably doesn't.") Indeed, Trump doesn't appear to be interested in Silicon Valley, except to roll off his numbers on each social media platform. ("On Facebook, I have close to 8 million people. On Twitter, I have 8.5 million. On Instagram, I have over a million people. I'm inching on 20 million people. I have friends, somebody that's a great writer, where they write a book and call me up and say, 'Can you do me a favor, can you tweet it?' " "Can you," I interject, "tweet my book, please?" "I will!") 
   
   Finishing his pint, he reflects again on the remarkableness of the campaign, asking his traveling staffers, Corey Lewandowski and press secretary Hope Hicks, as well as his son-in-law, to confirm again how remarkable it is. Lewandowski recites the latest polls (as of press time, they show Trump inching to within a few percentage points of Clinton in a head-to-head matchup), and Trump, with something beyond confidence, seems to declare de facto victory. 
   
   I broach his problems with women and Hispanics and the common wisdom that he'll have to do at least as well with these groups as Mitt Romney did in 2012. The "pivot" is the word more politico pros are using to refer to his expected turn to the center. "Unless," I offer, "you think you can remake the electoral math." He says he absolutely can. So no pivot. "It'll be different math than they've ever seen." He is, he says, bigger than anything anyone has ever seen. "I have a much bigger base than Romney. Romney was a stiff!" And he'll be bigger with the people he's bigger with, but also he'll be bigger with women and Hispanics and blacks, too. He believes, no matter what positions he holds or slurs he has made, that he is irresistible. 
   
   I ask if he sees himself as having similarities with leaders of the growing anti-immigrant (some would say outright racist) European nativist movements, like Marine Le Pen in France and Matteo Salvini in Italy, whom The Wall Street Journal reported Trump had met with and endorsed in Philadelphia. ("Matteo, I wish you become the next Italian premier soon," Trump was quoted as saying.) In fact, he insists he didn't meet Salvini. "I didn't want to meet him." And, in sum, he doesn't particularly see similarities — or at least isn't interested in them — between those movements and the anti-immigrant nationalism he is promoting in this country. 
   
   "And Brexit? Your position?" I ask. 
   
   "Huh?" 
   
   "Brexit." 
   
   "Hmm." 
   
   "The Brits leaving the EU," I prompt, realizing that his lack of familiarity with one of the most pressing issues in Europe is for him no concern nor liability at all. 
   
   "Oh yeah, I think they should leave." 
   
   It is hard not to feel that Trump understands himself, and that we're all in on this kind of spectacular joke. His shamelessness is just so … shameless. So how much, I ask — quite thinking he will get the nuance here — is the Trump brand based on exaggeration? He responds, with perfect literalness, none at all. I try again. He must understand. How could he not? "You've talked about negotiation, which is about compromise and about establishing positions that you can walk back from. How much about being a successful person involves … well, bullshitting? How much of success is playing games?" 
   
   If he does understand, he's definitely not taking this bait. I try again: "How much are you a salesman?" 
   
   Salesman, in the Trump worldview, is hardly a bad word, and he is quite willing to accept it, although, curiously, he doesn't want to be thought of that way when it comes to real estate. But as a politician, he's OK as a salesman. 
   
   Trump says he's reading Edward Klein's book Unlikeable: The Problem With Hillary. 
   
   In this, he sees himself — and becomes almost eloquent in talking about himself — as a sort of performer and voter whisperer. He is, he takes obvious pride in saying, the only politician who doesn't regularly use a teleprompter. With a prompter, he says, you can't work the crowd. You can't feel it. "You got to look at them in the eye. Have you ever seen me speak in front of a large group of people? Have you ever watched?" He reflects on the lack of self-consciousness that's necessary to make spontaneous utterances before a crowd. He cites a well-known actor (whose name he asks me not to use, "I don't want to hurt anybody"), who had wanted to run for office but, without a script, was a blithering idiot. Trump was never fed lines on The Apprentice, he says. It was all him: "You have to have a natural ability." 
   
   I ask if he'll use a teleprompter for his acceptance speech at the convention and, almost sorrowfully, he says he probably will. I find myself urging him not to, precisely for the theater of it all. The spontaneity. Who would want to miss that? Let Trump be Trump. 
   
   "Very interesting. What he's saying is very interesting," he notes to Lewandowski. 
   
   He's punted on Hillary as a topic since we started our conversation, as though to talk about her was not to talk about him. If in public he needs to treat her as his cause, in private he doesn't want her taking up his time. But I sneak it back. 
   
   "Did you ever vote for Bill?" I ask, thinking that both men have as much in common as they have that separates them. 
   
   "Let's see … did I ever? Eh, I don't want to say who I voted for." 
   
   Indeed. These two '80s guys were undoubtedly once quite in sync. 
   
   The anti-Christ Trump, the Trump of bizarre, outre, impractical and reactionary policies that most reasonable people yet believe will lead to an astounding defeat in November, is really hard to summon from Trump in person. He deflects that person, or, even, dissembles about what that person might have said (as much, he dissembles for conservatives about what the more liberal Trump might have said), and is impatient that anyone might want to focus on that version of Trump. It does then feel that the policies, such as they are, and the slurs, are not him. They are just a means to the end — to the phenomenon. To the center of attention. The biggest thing that has ever happened in politics. In America. The biggest thing is the theme. It's what he always wants to come back to. Bigness is unavoidable and inevitable. Bigness always wins. 
   
   Before Trump trundles off to bed — actually, before that, never too tired, he plans to watch himself on Kimmel — I ask that de rigeur presidential question, which does not seem yet to have been asked of him. "What books are you reading?" 
   
   He knows he's caught (it's a question that all politicians are prepped on, but who among his not-bookish coterie would have prepped him even with the standard GOP politician answer: the Bible?). But he goes for it. 
   
   "I'm reading the Ed Klein book on Hillary Clinton" — a particular hatchet job, which at the very least has certainly been digested for him. "And I'm reading the book on Richard Nixon that was, well, I'll get you the exact information on it. I'm reading a book that I've read before, it's one of my favorite books, All Quiet on the Western Front, which is one of the greatest books of all time." And one I suspect he's suddenly remembering from high school. But what the hell. 
   
   Donald Trump simply believes he is a unique individual, one whose singular conviction that he is special makes him appealing. And pay no attention to everything else. 
   
   A version of this story first appeared in the June 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe. ||||| Why it matters: A funding freeze could be seen as a slap against the organization — which the U.S. and Israel consider to be biased against Israel and too politicized — and an attempt to pressure the Palestinians to return to peace talks with Israel. But a State Department official said that the fact the money wasn't transferred on Jan. 1 doesn't mean it was frozen. "There are still deliberations taking place, and we have until mid January to decide what we are going to do,” the official said. 
   
   The Trump administration has frozen $125 million in funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees, according to three Western diplomats who were informed of the move. They said the funding, one third of the annual U.S. donations to the agency, was supposed to be transferred by Jan. 1 but was withheld. 
   
   The details: The diplomats, who asked to speak on conditions of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the funding was frozen until the Trump administration finishes its review of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority. 
   
   The move comes after the Palestinian Authority suspended their contacts with the Trump administration in response to its decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. A senior White House official said no decision have been made yet, but confirmed that a review of the U.S. assistance to the Palestinians is underway "in light of the Palestinians' recent conduct." 
   
   The diplomats added that U.S. officials told U.N. officials in the last two days that President Trump is considering totally cutting the part of the funding which was frozen, and is even considering cutting up to $180 million, which amounts to half of the U.S. funding to UNRWA. 
   
   The impact: The Western diplomats said freezing or cutting of such a big part of the U.S. funding would be catastrophic for the organization, would hamper its work and might lead to negative consequences for the Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon. 
   
   U.N. secretary general António Guterres has spoken with senior U.S. official about the UNRWA funding and also consulted with foreign ministers from other donor countries, according to the diplomats. 
   
   The Israeli security establishment and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories — the Israeli organization that oversees government activities in the West Bank and Gaza — are concerned about possible freezing or cutting of U.S. funding to UNRWA, fearing the escalation of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. 
   
   “The humanitarian situation in Gaza is complicated enough and harming UNRWA funding will only make it more complicated," a senior Israeli security official told me. 
   
   What we're hearing: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not enthusiastic about the cutting of U.S. funding to UNRWA, but is politically pressed by conservative ministers in his cabinet and by the fact he can't be more dovish on the Palestinian issue than President Trump. 
   
   Officials in the prime minister's office told diplomats from several western countries that Israel does not object to the cutting of U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority, but prefers that the U.S. doesn't cut funding to UNRWA due to the fact it also serves Israeli security interests. 
   
   A senior Israeli official told me Netanyahu is in touch with the White House on the UNRWA funding issue, and conveyed the message that Israel prefers “gradual disengagement" with UNRWA by the U.S. and not a big funding cut. 
   
   The prime minister's office said in a statement: "Netanyahu supports President Trump's critical attitude towards UNRWA and believes practical steps need to be taken in order to change the fact that UNRWA is being used to entrench the Palestinian refugee problem instead of solving it." ||||| 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.
target: – 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.