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.<\/p>\n
The publishers responded by moving the release date up by four days to Friday.<\/p>\n
Trump instructed his lawyers to prevent the release of \u201cFire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House\u201d — an expose by author and political muckraker Michael Wolff — which quotes key Trump aides expressing serious doubt about his fitness for office.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ccease and desist\u201d order from Trump\u2019s attorneys.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour 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,\u201d Trump\u2019s lawyers said in the letter to Wolff.<\/p>\n
In the book, Bannon is quoted accusing Trump\u2019s eldest son Don Jr of \u201ctreasonous\u201d contacts with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, and saying the president\u2019s daughter Ivanka, who imagines running for president one day, is \u201cdumb as a brick.\u201d<\/p>\n
But it is Trump himself who is cast in the most unfavorable light by a series of his top aides.<\/p>\n
The book claims that for \u201cSteve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the president was an \u2018idiot.\u2019 For Gary Cohn, he was \u2018dumb as shit.\u2019 For H.R. McMaster, he was a \u2018dope.\u2019 The list went on.\u201d<\/p>\n
White House issued a scorched-earth dismissal of the book, its author and his sources.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t 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,\u201d said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, calling the book \u201ccomplete fantasy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Behind the scenes, though, Trump has been enraged by the betrayal by Bannon — a man who engineered the New York real estate mogul\u2019s link to the nationalist far right and helped create a pro-Trump media ecosystem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17435,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17436,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17434\/revisions\/17436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}