A startling new book will hit bookstores next week which has already caused U.S. President Donald Trump to go on the offensive against his former adviser, Steve Bannon.
The book, which is titled Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, was penned by noted author Michael Wolff.
READ MORE: Steve Bannon called Trump Tower meeting with Russians ‘treasonous’ in new book
Wolff said in an author’s note that the book was based on more than 200 interviews, including multiple conversations with the president and senior staff.
Several media outlets published excerpts from the book on Wednesday, which prompted responses from Trump and the White House. Without addressing specifics, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said there were things in the book that were “completely untrue.”
In an excerpt from Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Bannon called a trio of Trump advisers, including Donald Trump Jr., “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” for a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer.
“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers,” Bannon was quoted as saying.
READ MORE: Trump says Bannon has ‘lost his mind’ after ‘treasonous’ Russia meeting comment
“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s–t, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
Trump responded Wednesday by saying: “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”
READ MORE: Steve Bannon, ousted from White House, says Trump presidency he helped build is ‘over’
Here are some of the other strange revelations which came out of the excerpts released by various media outlets Wednesday:
Trump did not expect to beat Hillary Clinton and his win left the wife in a bad state
From the Guardian: “Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears — and not of joy.”
Trump is afraid of being poisoned
“He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s — nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely pre-made.”
Ivanka Trump may run for president one day
“Balancing risk against reward, both Jared and Ivanka decided to accept roles in the West Wing over the advice of almost everyone they knew. It was a joint decision by the couple, and, in some sense, a joint job. Between themselves, the two had made an earnest deal: If sometime in the future the opportunity arose, she’d be the one to run for president. The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”
Bannon believes Trump may have met with Russian officials
“The chance that Don Jr did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero,” said an excerpt published in the Guardian.
The White House denied these claims on Wednesday.
Trump has a tough time focusing
An excerpt in New York Magazine says that early in the campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” Nunberg recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
Ivanka Trump makes fun of her dad’s comb-over to friends
Also from New York Magazine: (Ivanka Trump) treated her father with a degree of detachment, even irony, going so far as to make fun of his comb-over to others. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate — a contained island after scalp-reduction surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men — the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.
Kushner’s plan was foiled by Trump’s Twitter work
Hoping to soothe relations with Mexico, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner arranged for Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto to be the first foreign official to meet with Trump at the White House.
Also from New York Magazine: The next day, on Twitter, Trump blasted Mexico for stealing American jobs. “If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall,” the president declared, “then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.” At which point Peña Nieto did just that, leaving Kushner’s negotiation and statecraft as so much scrap on the floor.
— With files from Associated Press, AFP, Reuters