He'll be up all night

Inside the White House, a bunker mentality took hold Wednesday. There was a sense of palpable anger at the quotes Bannon gave to Wolff for his book. According to White House sources, Trump personally dictated key parts of the statement bashing his former chief strategist to senior communications staff, including Communications Director Hope Hicks. He was emphatic about including put-downs such as “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,” and “Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory...”

[...]

According to those who spoke with the president on Wednesday, Trump appeared more furious that Bannon appeared to take too much credit for the 2016 victory, and less focused on the “treasonous” remarks.

  The Daily Beast

How typically Trump.

Members of President Trump’s inner circle, including his immediate family, were instantly enraged on Wednesday after the Bannon excerpts dropped, and began hitting the phones to communicate to friends the imperative of ensuring Bannon is banished in Trump-world.

[...]

But the broadside against Bannon obscured the existence of numerous other, similarly biting takes on Trump and his presidency. Wolff quotes News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch as calling Trump a “fucking idiot.” He quotes former Fox News chief Roger Ailes encouraging Bannon not to “give Donald too much to think about.”

[...]

Former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg, meanwhile, was quoted by Wolff as saying Trump’s limited attention span meant that he couldn’t get a tutorial on the constitution past the Fourth Amendment. Asked if this was true, Nunberg— who, it should be noted, was fired by Trump— told The Daily Beast that the quotes attributed to him were accurate. “I sat with Michael,” he explained. “He is a great writer.”

[...]

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and former chief of staff Reince Priebus believe Trump to be an “idiot.” Gary Cohn, the president’s top economic adviser, regards Trump as “dumb as shit.” The president’s top national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, considers him a “dope.” Even Trump’s beloved daughter, Ivanka, seems to be in on the gag.

“She treated her father with a degree of detachment, even irony,” wrote Wolff, “going so far as to make fun of his comb-over to others.”

She'll have to skip over that part when she reads the book to him.

Faced with such an overwhelming flood of mockery, the White House took the only route it could: denouncing the book as being built on a series of fallacies. And, indeed, some details seem sketchy (Wolff suggests that Trump didn’t know who former House Speaker John Boehner was despite the two men having once golfed together) and others potentially wrong.

I don't see that particular claim as being demonstrably false.

Both Walsh, and Trump’s longtime pal Tom Barrack (quoted as calling Trump “crazy” and “stupid”), both claimed they were quoted inaccurately.

Was expecting that.

According to sources close to Bannon, he did not privately dispute to friends, colleagues, and advisers on Wednesday anything attributed to him that appeared in the soon-to-be-released book. He didn’t claim to be taken out context, and instead insisted that he was right, and that these opinions have been his firmly held assessments for months.

There will be a rash of public denials coming soon.

I wonder how many people are babysitting Trump right now.

UPDATE 1/4:  THR article.