Fire and Fury PDF

This book could not be more obvious. With the inauguration
of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, the United States entered the eye of the
most extraordinary political storm since at least Watergate. As the day
approached, I set out to tell this story in as contemporaneous a fashion as
possible, and to try to see life in the Trump White House through the eyes of the
people closest to it.
This was originally conceived as an account of the Trump administration’s
first hundred days, that most traditional marker of a presidency. But events
barreled on without natural pause for more than two hundred days, the curtain
coming down on the first act of Trump’s presidency only with the appointment
of retired general John Kelly as the chief of staff in late July and the exit of chief
strategist Stephen K. Bannon three weeks later.
The events I’ve described in these pages are based on conversations that took
place over a period of eighteen months with the president, with most members of
his senior staff - some of whom talked to me dozens of times - and with many
people who they in turn spoke to. The first interview occurred well before I
could have imagined a Trump White House, much less a book about it, in late
May 2016 at Trump’s home in Beverly Hills - the then candidate polishing off a
pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla as he happily and idly opined about a range of
topics while his aides, Hope Hicks, Corey Lewandowski, and Jared Kushner,
went in and out of the room. Conversations with members of the campaign’s
team continued through the Republican Convention in Cleveland, when it was
still hardly possible to conceive of Trump’s election. They moved on to Trump
Tower with a voluble Steve Bannon - before the election, when he still seemed
like an entertaining oddity, and later, after the election, when he seemed like amiracle worker.
Shortly after January 20, I took up something like a semipermanent seat on a
couch in the West Wing. Since then I have conducted more than two hundred
interviews.
While the Trump administration has made hostility to the press a virtual
policy, it has also been more open to the media than any White House in recent
memory. In the beginning, I sought a level of formal access to this White House,
something of a fly-on-the-wall status. The president himself encouraged this
idea. But, given the many fiefdoms in the Trump White House that came into
open conflict from the first days of the administration, there seemed no one
person able to make this happen. Equally, there was no one to say “Go away.”
Hence I became more a constant interloper than an invited guest - something
quite close to an actual fly on the wall - having accepted no rules nor having
made any promises about what I might or might not write.
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. Those
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 accounts and through sources I have come to trust,
settled on a version of events I believe to be true.
Some of my sources spoke to me on so-called deep background, a convention
of contemporary political books that allows for a disembodied description of
events provided by an unnamed witness to them. I have also relied on off-therecord interviews, allowing a source to provide a direct quote with the
understanding that it was not for attribution.