It’s been four years since Michael Wolff wrote a book about President Donald Trump. His last was 2021’s Landslide, which he wrote right after 2019’s Siege: Trump Under Fire, which, of course, came out just a year after the publication of his blockbuster page-turner Fire and Fury in 2018.
Today, we’re getting the not-so-long-awaited All or Nothing, which details the backroom shenanigans behind how 45 managed against all odds to get elected 47. Trump may not be one of Wolff’s biggest fans — “a total LOSER,” the president posted last weekend — but The Hollywood Reporter has seen some early pages, mostly dealing with Trump’s on-again-off-again relationship with News Corp mogul Rupert Murdoch, and Wolff does, as always, spill the tea.
You’ll probably recall how Murdoch turned on Trump after Jan. 6, only to have second thoughts after it became clear that Trump could actually get back into the White House. Wolff recounts in excruciating detail Murdoch’s attempts to rekindle the old magic — how Murdoch called so often that Trump started cracking jokes about how the 93-year-old Aussie “could not remember that he had called him the day before.” There’s also a cringy moment when Murdoch introduces Trump to his new, fifth wife, Elena Zhukova. “She’s Russian,” Murdoch tells him, playing the Slav mate card.
According to Wolff, Murdoch’s attempts to re-woo Trump sometimes went awry. In March, Murdoch thought he’d please the president by having the New York Post run a headline about how Trump attended a wake for a slain New York police officer while at the same time presidents Biden, Obama and Clinton groveled for money at nearby $25 million fundraiser. As Wolff writes, though, Trump “seemed to miss the point of the headline, sorely pissed and disbelieving about the $25 million. ‘How could that fucking be? This is fake. It’s gotta be fake. If they’re really doing such good business, what does that mean? It means I have shitty people.’”
There’s also inside dish on what Trump’s circle made of their boss’s cozy friendship with Fox News star Sean Hannity, particularly after Jan. 6, when the channel’s owner was still ticked off at Trump. “To many in Trump-world,” Wolff writes, “observing the Trump-and-Hannity byplay, Trump, in refusing to understand that Fox News was no longer his safe space, was the innocent figure, the big, good-hearted quarterback on the high school team. And Hannity was the kid with all the angles, easily playing the dopey big guy.”
And there’s intel on how Murdoch lobbied for Trump to pick former secretary of state Mike Pompeo as vp instead of JD Vance (“There was almost no earthly possibility”) as well as some fly-on-the-wall reporting from a meeting Trump called with Murdoch and his top lieutenants during the campaign, during which Trump complained about Fox News allowing Kamala Harris ads on its airwaves. “Trump focused on Murdoch, assailing him for having fired Roger Ailes, the Fox founder whom Murdoch had dismissed in 2016 over sexual harassment charges,” Wolff writes. “Ailes, Trump insisted, would never have screwed him like this.” There’s even more from another meeting around the same time with the editorial board of Murdoch’s The Wall Street Journal. “Trump read from a list of grievances he had with the paper, enumerating a ten-year litany of all the times the Journal had been wrong and he had been right,” Wolff wrote.
Indeed, there’s enough Trump craziness on these pages to keep Wolff fans amused — and horrified — for at least the next six months. Right about when he should be publishing his next book.
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