Michael Wolff

Fire and Fury reached shops on 5 January 2018 after Donald Trump's lawyers tried to stop it, and the attempt only widened the audience for it. Michael Wolff, born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1953, had spent months sitting on a couch in the West Wing lobby watching who came and went, and turned that into the first of four books; Siege followed in 2019, Landslide, on the closing months of the presidency and the election claims that ran through them, in 2021, and All or Nothing in 2025. Earlier he wrote Burn Rate, an unsparing report on his own failed internet company, and The Man Who Owns the News, a biography of Rupert Murdoch. He left Vassar for Columbia, was a copy boy at the New York Times as a student, and later wrote columns for New York magazine, Vanity Fair, USA Today and the Hollywood Reporter, winning two National Magazine Awards. His method draws steady objection: people quoted in both Burn Rate and Fire and Fury have denied the words put in their mouths.