A new report from Business Insider further delegitimizes the new book by Michael Wolff.
The author of the explosive new book about Donald Trump’s presidency acknowledged in the book that he wasn’t certain all of its content was true.
Michael Wolff, the author of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” included a note at the start that casts significant doubt on the reliability of the specifics contained in the rest of its pages.
Several of his sources, he says, were definitely lying to him, while some offered accounts that flatly contradicted those of others.
But some were nonetheless included in the vivid account of the West Wing’s workings, in a process Wolff describes as “allowing the reader to judge” whether the sources’ claims are true.
This is a huge admission by Micheal Wolff. Wolff is basically saying that his book is nothing more than a compilation of propaganda by people inside and out of the administration.
In other cases, the media columnist said, he did use his journalistic judgment and research to arrive at what he describes “a version of events I believe to be true.”
Here is the relevant part of the note, from the 10th page of the book’s prologue:
“Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.
“Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”
The book itself, reviewed by Business Insider from a copy acquired prior to its Friday publication, is not always clear about what level of confidence the author has in any particular assertion.
Lengthy, private conversations are reported verbatim, as are difficult-to-ascertain details like what somebody was thinking or how the person felt.
Wolff attributes his book to “more than two hundred interviews” with people including Trump and “most members of his senior staff.” According to the news website Axios, Wolff has dozens of hours of tapes to back up what he said.
A few things to look at here. The first is that I actually gained some respect for this author Micheal Wolff. Yes, I think it’s ridiculous that this book of propaganda is even being written but he does have a secret weapon. That secret weapon is the hours of tape he has of the recordings. Due to the fact he recorded these people if there are any people denying what Wolff wrote then we can go back to the recordings. Now, this won’t stop lies from being in the book but it will make every claim have to have a name behind it.
