Fire and Fury [antikvár]

AUTHOR'S NOTE The reason to write 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 oflF a pint of Haagen-Dazs vanilla as he happily and idly opined about a range of topics while his aides, Hope