President Donald Trump on Sunday assailed as a “Fake Book” an explosive behind-the-scenes account that questions his fitness for office, as allies lined up to defend the US leader, with one dubbing him a “political genius.” The White House has been pushing back hard against the unflattering portrayal of the president in “Fire and Fury,” a supposed tell-all book by Michael Wolff that extensively quotes former top Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
Bannon, facing intense fire from the White House, issued a statement Sunday expressing “unwavering” support for the president. He said his reported criticism of a meeting between son Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer as “treasonous” was aimed mainly at another campaign aide who should have known the Russians “are not our friends.” But Bannon’s statement to the Axios news website did not specifically deny any of his reported comments, nor did it contain a forthright apology for his part in touching off the buzzsaw of criticism spawned by the book.
Trump tweeted Sunday that the instant bestseller — which paints him as disengaged, ill-informed and unstable, with signs of serious memory loss — was a “Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author.” A day earlier, seeking to refute Wolff’s suggestion that he lacked stability, Trump called himself a “very stable genius.” Senior Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller treated the book derisively while insisting that his boss was in fact “a political genius,” in an interview with CNN on Sunday. Wolff, Miller said, “is a garbage author of a garbage book.” He assailed Bannon, reportedly a key source for the author, as “vindictive” and “out of touch with reality.”
Wolff defended his work on Sunday, telling NBC he “absolutely did not” violate any off-the-record agreements in his reporting but conceding, of the total three hours he said he spent with Trump, that the president “probably did not think of them as interviews.” He also portrayed a high level of concern in the White House over whether Trump risks being removed from office as unfit, as is possible — if difficult — under the constitution’s 25th Amendment. Almost daily, he said, White House aides would say, “We’re not at a 25th Amendment level yet.”
