book devoted to the president s family. here s one example of wolff describing how they wielded power inside the white house. the trump family was not going to be run by its lawyers. jared and ivanka helped to coordinate a series of lurid leaks, drinking, bad behavior, personal life in disarray about marcs cou s coulcosowitz who ad president to send the couple home. shortly after, kasowitz was out. what do we know about the clout of the president s daughter and son-in-law? clearly what this book showed and it echoes a lot of my own reporting is that really there was this power struggle between steve bannon on one side who represented the president s base and ivanka and her husband who wanted trump to reach out and be more palatable to a mainstream-style of politics. this was the defining struggle
really big right by you, look at like i could just reach out, i could just touch. ow, ow. that s great. al, it s good to have you, sir. you, too, my friend. it s personal, the shots that steve bannon takes at ivanka trump and jared kushner in this new book.
in an e-mail from top white house aide gary cohen. let me add nbc news has not confirmed this. a senior white house official denies both the substance and existence of such an e-mail. but again, this is what wolff writes. in april, an e-mail originally copied to more than a dozen people went into far wider circulation when it was forwarded and reforwarded. purporting to represent the views of gary cohn and summarizing the appalled sense in much of the white house. the e-mail read, it s worse than you can imagine. an idiot surrounded by clowns. trump won t read anything, not one page memo, not the brief policy papers, nothing. he gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. and his staff is no better. kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. bannon is an arrogant expletive who thinks he s smarter than he is. trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits. no one will survive the first
in quotes? he talks about just sitting on the west wing couch and just watching the staffers and the aides as they were running by. he calls it a thoroughfare. and he had access, close access, to all of the senior aides. he talks about the author s note. also check out an author s note to see how somebody put together a book. he talking about how he did this with hundreds of interviews from the president to the senior staff, some who tooked dozens of times. that s kind of a questionable thi thing. makes you wonder what in the book might be hearsay or second or third hand. there s already some folks coming out saying i never said that. so the question is how is he going to be able to authenticate some quotes in the book. he does have some tapes. did doesn t sound like he has tapes of all of the interviews. the very first anecdote in the book is about a dinner between steve bannon and roger ailes. where ailes seems to be, as wolff rights, incredulous, who
donald trump, who knows nothing, has no political beliefs, actually pulled this off and actually won. and it s a very vivid, very detailed account of that meeting that has, in itself, some explosive details. the question is, how in the world did he recount this? did steve bannon just tell him about this? how can you trust this is what roger ailes said? after all, roger ails is no longer with us. turns out, according to wolff, he was the one who hosted the dinner. he was there for watching as bannon was trying to convince roger ailes that steve bannon had donald trump in lock step with the bannon way of doing things, the nationalism way of doing things. the fox news way of doing things. the washington post, i m sure you read the article, raised some of the same issues. he noted that wolff in the past has been called blunt, pathetic and calculating. a provoketeur.