Rattled by a one-two punch of betrayal and scandal, Donald Trump on Thursday tried to block the publication of a bare-knuckle book that portrays his White House as a fetid stew of backbiting, incompetence and dysfunction.

The publishers responded by moving the release date up by four days to Friday.

Trump instructed his lawyers to prevent the release of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” — an expose by author and political muckraker Michael Wolff — which quotes key Trump aides expressing serious doubt about his fitness for office.

The book — which paints Trump as mentally unstable and far out of his depth — quotes at length his former ally and chief strategist Steve Bannon, who also received a “cease and desist” order from Trump’s attorneys.

“Your publication of the false/baseless statements about Mr. Trump gives rise to, among other claims, defamation by libel, defamation by libel per se, false light invasion of privacy, tortious interference with contractual relations, and inducement of breach of contract,” Trump’s lawyers said in the letter to Wolff.

In the book, Bannon is quoted accusing Trump’s eldest son Don Jr of “treasonous” contacts with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, and saying the president’s daughter Ivanka, who imagines running for president one day, is “dumb as a brick.”

But it is Trump himself who is cast in the most unfavorable light by a series of his top aides.

The book claims that for “Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the president was an ‘idiot.’ For Gary Cohn, he was ‘dumb as shit.’ For H.R. McMaster, he was a ‘dope.’ The list went on.”

White House issued a scorched-earth dismissal of the book, its author and his sources.

“I don’t think (Americans) really care about some trash that an author that no one had ever heard of until today, or a fired employee, wants to peddle,” said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, calling the book “complete fantasy.”

Behind the scenes, though, Trump has been enraged by the betrayal by Bannon — a man who engineered the New York real estate mogul’s link to the nationalist far right and helped create a pro-Trump media ecosystem.