Fire and Fury summary: All the most explosive moments in new book from inside Trump's White House

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The most explosive claims from a new book about Trump's white house

Michael Wolff's explosive book from inside the workings of the Trump White House has finally become public, sending shockwaves around the world.

The book – which has already been criticised by both Trump himself as well as critics – contains a range of huge claims about the president and those who surround him.

Extracts from Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House had already made headlines around the world. But people are finally getting their hands on their own copies of the book, rather than excerpted details from the expose.

That's because the book's publication schedule was pushed forward by publisher Little, Brown because of "unprecedented demand". The book is now available in bookshops, as well as on Amazon, where it appears to have already sold out.

Here's our full summary – assembled live during the read through – of the experience of reading the explosive book.

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[5 January 2018 12:37 · Andrew Griffin]

Wolff is detailing the process required to write the various executive orders that Trump wanted to sign when he came into office, including the controversial immigration decision. It was, as you might expect, an utterly chaotic process, Wolff reports.

The idea to use them was Bannon's. And he was the one who wrote many of them – even though, Wolff reports, he was in such a rush to get things done that he didn't use a computer. The job of actually putting them together, at least in the case of the so-called Muslim ban, fell to Stephen Miller. Wolff is very dismissive of that Trump aide, who reportedly was intended partly as a speechwriter but couldn't even string a sentence together.

Bannon put all that together as a "back-of-the-envelope" executive order. And Trump signed it.

As we know, it kicked off perhaps the most vociferous and organised opposition to any decision Trump has made so far. But Bannon was "satisfied", despite the hate picked up even within the White House. In fact, that was part of the aim: it allowed him to see a clear divide between the people who embraced his chaotic vision and those who weren't yet converted.

Indeed, he specifically aimed to have the EO signed on a Friday, so that it would cause the most possible disruption at airports and bring out the most protestors, Wolff claims, so that the activists would look "crazy" and get dragged to the left.

"Errr ... That's why," the book reports him saying. "So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot."

[5 January 2018 13:04 · Andrew Griffin]

Sorry about that brief delay. I took a break to write up the revelations about the Muslim ban. You can read the full report here. Now back to the book!

[5 January 2018 13:09 · Andrew Griffin]

Some of the revelations aren't so earth-shattering, but just plain weird. Wolff writes about TV presenters Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski coming to have dinner (including fish, which the latter doesn't eat) at the White House. They got to talking about their then supposedly secret, but not really secret, relationship.

That led to Kushner suggesting that since he is an "Internet Unitarian minister", he should do the honours. That reportedly upset the president, who scoffed at the idea they'd want his son-in-law to conduct the marriage; they could have it done by the actual president at Mar-a-Lago, Wolff reports him as saying.

[5 January 2018 13:09 · Andrew Griffin]

You can send over any questions, requests or other comments on Twitter, where I'm @_Andrew_Griffin.

[5 January 2018 13:13 · Andrew Griffin]

Jared and Ivanka were warned not to try and take an official job in the Trump White House. But instead, they were thinking about the big one, Wolff writes:

They came to an agreement that even if they had objections to Trump's presidency, they'd work to make sure they seized the strange historical circumstances they'd found them in by accident.

That might involve, perhaps, a presidential run for themselves in the future. If that happened, it would be Ivanka that got the first go; she would be the first woman president, she said, not Hillary Clinton.

Steve Bannon is said to have mocked the two of them, uttering disbelief before saying "oh my god".

[5 January 2018 13:15 · Andrew Griffin]

Just to step out of the reporting for a second: one strange thing about this book is that it's all written in the past tense. That even includes the writing about Trump's character and his presidency, all of which still applies. Was this written with a view to standing the test even if the presidency comes to a swift end sometime soon? Or is that just a stylistic choice to keep its historical feel?

[5 January 2018 13:20 · Andrew Griffin]

Now we're onto Jared, and the tone is much the same as the discussion of Bannon: who is this guy? Why did he decide that Trumpism represented his future, despite having grown up as an orthodox Jew and as a committed Democrat? Wolff speculates that it's just a recognition that he'd accidentally been in the right place at the right time, and that his father-in-law's win simply represented an opportunity he tried to seize upon. And he was already feeling some resentment towards the New York liberal elites who he had tried and failed to court by buying the New York Observer.

Plus he could help fix the problems of Trumpism, perhaps. Don't want to spoil the rest of the readthrough, but – my guess is that mission doesn't go especially well.

[5 January 2018 13:26 · Andrew Griffin]

Ivanka has, according to Wolff, revealed the secret behind her father's strange hair:

He has an absolutely "clean pate" at the top of his head, says Wolff, a bald patch that is the result of scalp reduction surgery on his head. There's a "furry circle" of hair at the sides and front of his head, and he takes the ends up from there to the middle before sweeping them back and sticking the whole thing down with a stiffening spray.

His hair's strange orangey blond colour comes from a product he uses to dye it, called Just For Men. That dye is supposed to stay on his head and gradually darken it – but he is so impatient that he washes it off, leaving it with little time to do his work and turning his hair its strange transparent hue.

[5 January 2018 13:37 · Andrew Griffin]

Why is Trump so weird? Or rather, why has he continued to be such a weird president? Here's one theory, writes Wolff: everyone else who's become president has moved from relatively normal life into a very strange, opulent life, full of servants and security officers with constant access to a plane and anything else you want. But that's what Trump's life already looked like, and that's how it continues to look. So he doesn't realise how important his new job is, Wolff writes, claiming to relay a theory from inside the White House.

But another theory floating around Washington suggests the complete opposite. Mr Trump was a creature of intense, sometimes unusual habit – and his immense wealth allowed him to ensure that his life never much changed. He's lived in the same apartment in Trump Tower since it was built in 1983, he has worked in another part of the building just a few floors down, and he's not even changed the decor or the staff since.

[5 January 2018 13:44 · Andrew Griffin]

Much has been made of Trump's bedroom – where he roams watching Fox News, perhaps wearing his bathrobe. Wolff offers more detail on that strange, world-changing place.

He tends to retreat into his own room in the White House, the book claims. And that room is notable: it's the first since Kennedy was president that the first couple have had separate bedrooms. (That matters less given than Melania tends to spend time in New York, at Trump Tower.)

His control over his bedroom has caused problems for the various people paid to look after him. He tried, for instance, to install a lock on the door; a decision objected to by the Secret Service, who need to get in for obvious reasons, and led to a "brief standoff" between the president and his protectors. He fell out also with his housekeeping staff, who kept picking up his shirt, and ended up warning that "if my shirt is on the floor, it's because I want it on the floor".

Eventually he ruled that nobody should touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. He is afraid of being poisoned, which is part of why he likes eating at McDonald's – the food was prepared in advance and so couldn't include anything meant to kill him. Nobody would change his sheets without him saying so, and he'd take the old ones off himself.

Inside that room came a fairly predictable schedule of TV-watching, cheeseburger-eating, and phone-calling. Sometimes he'd eat with Steve Bannon at 6.30, but otherwise he'd be in bed that early and taking part in perhaps his three favourite activities.