Liliputin-5799

I'm afraid of Michael Wolff ... "
Melania Trump

Liliputins. What, the heck, is this?
http://stihi.ru/2025/03/08/5867

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Michael Wolff: "Melania F*cking Hates Her Husband" | Anthony Scaramucci | Open Book

Anthony Scaramucci
Feb 27, 2025  Full Length Open Book Episodes
Michael Wolff has written four New York Times bestsellers since 2018, including the #1 Fire and Fury. In addition to his three prior books about the Trump White House, his twelve books include The Man Who Owns the News; The Fall: The End of Fox News; and Burn Rate. For more than a decade, Wolff was a regular columnist for New York Magazine and Vanity Fair. He is the winner of two National Magazine Awards.

Get his most recent book “All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America” here: https://a.co/d/gEVPfkl

Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. He is the host of the podcast Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, he lives in Manhasset, Long Island.

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Michael Wolff: The Truth About Trump And Melania

The Daily Beast
May 13, 2025  The Daily Beast Podcast
Joanna Coles sits down with author Michael Wolff, the man whose bestsellers including "Fire & Fury" and "All or Nothing" are the definitive guide to Donald Trump's presidencies. Wolff lifts the lid on what's really going on in Trump's marriage to Melania and what the report that she's only been at the White House 14 times should have said. He reveals why Trump is crazy about his $400 million free plane from the Qataris. And he predicts exactly what is going to happen to Trump for the next three years.

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Michael Wolff (born 1953) is an American journalist, as well as a columnist and contributor to USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and the UK edition of GQ. He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate (1998) about his own dot-com company, and The Man Who Owns the News (2008), a biography of Rupert Murdoch. He co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek.

On January 5, 2018, Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published, containing unflattering descriptions of behavior by U.S. President Donald Trump, chaotic interactions among the White House senior staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. The book quickly became a New York Times number-one bestseller and was the first of four books about Trump in power, the others being Siege (2019), Landslide (2021) and All or Nothing (2025).

Early life and education
Michael Wolff was born in 1953[1] in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of[2] Lewis Allen Wolff (1920–1984),[3] a Jewish[2] advertising professional, and Marguerite (Vanderwerf) "Van" Wolff (1925–2012)[4] a reporter for Paterson Evening News.[5][6] Wolff graduated from Montclair Academy (now Montclair Kimberley Academy) in 1971, where he was student council president in his senior year.[7] He attended Vassar College and transferred to Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1975.[8][9] While a student at Columbia, he worked for The New York Times as a copy boy.[10][11]

Career
1970s
He published his first magazine article in the New York Times Magazine in 1974: a profile of Angela Atwood, a neighbor of his family who helped kidnap Patricia Hearst as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Shortly afterward, he left the Times and became a contributing writer to the New Times, a bi-weekly news magazine started by Jon Larsen and George Hirsch. Wolff's first book was White Kids (1979), a collection of essays.

1990s
In 1991, Wolff launched Michael Wolff & Company, Inc., specializing in book-packaging. Its first project, Where We Stand, was a book with a companion PBS series. The company's next major project was creating one of the first guides to the Internet, albeit in book form. Net Guide was published by Random House.[12]

In the fall of 1998, Wolff published a book, Burn Rate, which recounted the details of the financing, positioning, personalities, and ultimate breakdown of Wolff's start-up Internet company, Wolff New Media. The book became a bestseller. In its review of Wolff's book Burn Rate, Brill's Content criticized Wolff for "apparent factual errors" and said that 13 people, including subjects he mentioned, complained that Wolff had "invented or changed quotes".[13]

In August 1998, Wolff was recruited by New York magazine to write a weekly column. Over the next six years, he wrote more than 300 columns [14] that included criticism of the entrepreneur Steven Brill, the media banker Steven Rattner, and the book publisher Judith Regan.[15][16][17]

2000s

Wolff at the 2008 Monaco Media Forum
Wolff was nominated for the National Magazine Award three times, winning twice.[18] His second National Magazine Award was for a series of columns he wrote from the media center in the Persian Gulf as the Iraq War started in 2003. His book, Autumn of the Moguls (2004),[19] which predicted the mainstream media crisis[clarification needed] that hit later in the decade, was based on many of his New York magazine columns.

In 2004, when New York magazine's owners, Primedia Inc., put the magazine up for sale, Wolff helped assemble a group of investors, including New York Daily News publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, and financier Jeffrey Epstein to back him in acquiring the magazine.[20][21][22] Although the group believed it had made a successful bid, Primedia decided to sell the magazine to the investment banker Bruce Wasserstein.[23][22]

In a 2004 cover story for The New Republic, Michelle Cottle wrote that Wolff was "uninterested in the working press," preferring to focus on "the power players—the moguls" and was "fixated on culture, style, buzz, and money, money, money." She also noted that "the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created—springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events," calling his writing "a whirlwind of flourishes and tangents and asides that often stray so far from the central point that you begin to wonder whether there is a central point."[24]

In 2005, Wolff joined Vanity Fair as its media columnist.[25][26] In 2007, with Patrick Spain, the founder of Hoover's, and Caroline Miller, the former editor-in-chief of New York magazine, he launched Newser, a news aggregator website.[27]

That year, he also wrote a biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, based on more than 50 hours of conversation with Murdoch and extensive access to his business associates and his family. The book was published in 2008.[28][29] Beginning in mid-2008, Wolff briefly worked as a weekly columnist for The Industry Standard, an Internet trade magazine published by IDG.[30] David Carr, in a review Business Insider's Maxwell Tani described as "scathing" wrote that Wolff was "far less circumspect" than most other journalists.[31][28]

2010s

Wolff (left) with John Gapper (right) in 2012
Wolff received a 2010 Mirror Award in the category Best Commentary: Traditional Media for his work in Vanity Fair.[32]

In 2010, Wolff became editor of the advertising trade publication Adweek. He was asked to step down one year later, amid a disagreement as to "what this magazine should be".[33]

As of 2018 he was a contributor to the British GQ magazine.[34]

2020s
From January 2024, Wolff participated in Rewriting Trump,[35] a 90-minute documentary,[36] co-directed by Yasmine Permaul and Arthur Cary, produced by Sky Studios, for Sky Documentaries[37] in the U.K., about Trump's return to the White House, first broadcast on 28 February 2025,[38] and later via NOW TV.[39] Rewriting Trump follows Wolff as he follows the election campaign, while writing his book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America.[40][41]

Trump books
Fire and Fury (2018)
Main article: Fire and Fury
In early January 2018, Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published. Excerpts released before publication included unflattering descriptions of behavior by U.S. President Donald Trump, chaotic interactions among the White House senior staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.[42] News of the book's imminent publication and its embarrassing depiction of Trump prompted Trump and his lawyer, Charles Harder, to issue on January 4, 2018, a cease and desist letter alleging false statements, defamation, and malice, and to threaten libel lawsuits against Wolff, his publisher Henry Holt and Company, and Bannon, an action that actually stimulated pre-launch book sales.[43][44] On January 8, Henry Holt's attorney, Elizabeth McNamara, responded to Harder's allegations with an assurance that no apology or retraction would be forthcoming, while also noting that Harder's complaint cited no specific errors in Wolff's text.[45] John Sargent, the chief executive of Macmillan-Holt, informed the publisher's employees that "as citizens, we must demand that President Trump understand and abide by the First Amendment of our Constitution."[45]

According to other lawyers and a historian, threats of a lawsuit by Trump against a book author and publisher were unprecedented by a sitting president attempting to suppress freedom of speech protected by the U.S. First Amendment.[46][47] Before its release on January 5, the book and e-book reached number one both on Amazon.com and the Apple iBooks Store,[48] and by January 8, over one million books had been sold or ordered.[45]

Siege: Trump under Fire (2019)
Wolff's book, Siege: Trump Under Fire, was released on June 4, 2019. In it he claims that the Justice Department had drafted indictment documents against Trump in March 2018, accusing him of three criminal counts relating to interfering with a pending investigation and witness tampering. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is reported to have sat on these draft indictments for a year before deciding that Justice Department policy would prevent such an indictment.[49] "The documents described do not exist," Mueller spokesman Peter Carr said, referring to the purported three-count charging document against Trump.[50]

Landslide (2021)
Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, his third book about Trump, was published in 2021.[51]

All or Nothing (2025)
All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, an account of the Trump 2024 presidential campaign, was published in February 2025.[52]

Criticism and controversies

This article's "criticism" or "controversy" section may compromise the article's neutrality. Please help rewrite or integrate negative information to other sections through discussion on the talk page. (January 2023)
While being interviewed during Fire and Fury's publicity tour, Wolff said he was "absolutely sure" President Trump was having an affair and suggested on two occasions that his partner was Nikki Haley, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.[53][54] Haley denied Wolff's allegations, calling them "disgusting". Erik Wemple of The Washington Post said that Wolff was engaging in a "remarkable multimedia slime job".[55] Bari Weiss in The New York Times said that Wolff was "gleefully" spreading "evidence-free detail".[56] On February 25, 2018, Wolff was interviewed by Ben Fordham on the Australian morning show Today, where he was asked about his claim that Trump was having an affair behind Melania Trump's back.[57] Wolff stated that he couldn't hear the question, prompting Fordham to repeat it and eventually asking "you're not hearing me, Mr. Wolff?" to which Wolff replied, "no, I'm not getting anything", before removing his ear piece and walking off the set.[58] Both Fordham and the Today show later tweeted a video that included the audio from the ear piece which revealed that the question could be heard.[59] Days earlier, after being pressed about the rumor in a college press tour interview, Wolff stated "I do not know if the president is having an affair" and added "this is the last thing I say about it".[60]

The Columbia Journalism Review criticized Wolff in 2010 for suggesting that The New York Times was aggressively covering the breaking News International phone hacking scandal as a way of attacking News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch.[61] The Guardian criticized Wolff's book Too Famous for the way it portrayed controversial celebrities including Steve Bannon, Jeffrey Epstein, and Christopher Hitchens.[62]

Several people have denied quotes published in Fire and Fury. These people include Tom Barrack, Tony Blair, Katie Walsh, and Anna Wintour.[63][64][65] Sean Hannity also denied that he let Donald Trump review questions before interviewing him.[63]

Columnist David Brooks questioned Wolff's credibility since Wolff has been known to not check his facts. Brooks expressed doubts about Wolff's journalistic methods and conveyed skepticism over the accuracy of Fire and Fury.[66]

The View host Meghan McCain criticized Wolff for publishing an off-the-record conversation with Roger Ailes in Fire and Fury.[67][68]

Journalist Steven Rattner referred to Wolff as an "unprincipled writer of fiction."[69]

Alan Dershowitz criticized Wolff's book Siege: Trump Under Fire, calling it fiction. Wolff wrote in the book that Dershowitz had a dinner with Donald Trump at the White House to discuss the possibility of representing him. However Dershowitz claimed this dinner never happened.[70]

PolitiFact writer Angie Drobnic Holan noted that Fire and Fury contains several factual errors, including that Trump did not know who John Boehner was in 2016 (Trump had tweeted about Boehner in 2015) and that Wilbur Ross was Trump's choice for US Secretary of Labor (rather than Secretary of Commerce).[71]

Some questioned Wolff using Sam Nunberg as a source in Fire and Fury since Nunberg had admitted to fabricating a story about Chris Christie in the past.[72]


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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) ORIGINAL TRAILER [HD 1080p
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) Finale

The Title’s Inspiration
The film’s title is a reference to the nursery rhyme “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” and serves as a metaphor for the characters’ fears and insecurities.


What’s Up With the Ending?
The main action of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? centers around the vicious battle of wills between George and Martha. Martha is a ruthless opponent, and George doesn't get the upper-hand until nearly the end of the play. After being brow beaten, humiliated, and cheated on, George defeats Martha with four simple words: "our son is…dead" (3.245). Martha reacts to this news by erupting into a bestial howl and collapsing to the floor.

It would seem pretty normal for Martha to react dramatically to the death of her son if she actually had a son. The thing is that George and Martha's son is purely imaginary. When they found out they couldn't have kids, they solved the problem by just making a kid up. Even though he's imaginary, both George and Martha have deep attachment to the boy. Martha reveals the depth of her feeling when she says that he is, "the one light in all this hopeless…darkness" (3.401). The darkness in question is probably her "sewer of a marriage," which she also describes as "vile" and "crushing" (3.401).

This dream of a son seems to be so precious to both George and Martha because it's one of the few things they share. They created him together in order to escape from their "sick nights, and pathetic, stupid days" (3.401). The boy is the one bit of real intimacy that the unhappy couple shares. When George "kills" the son it's like he dropped a nuclear bomb. Now George and Martha are left with no illusions behind which they can hide. By the end of the play, they must stare, unblinkingly, into the charred battlefield that is their lives.


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A Summary and Analysis of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is probably the most famous and widely studied American play associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. Edward Albee’s play is about the dysfunctional and self-destructive marriage between a history professor and his wife, witnessed over the course of one night (or, technically, one very early morning) following a party.

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But how should we analyse Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Before we come to the question of analysis, here’s a brief recap of the play’s absurdist plot.

Plot summary


The setting for the play is a professor’s house on the campus of a New England university. At two o’clock in the morning, George, a professor of history, and his wife Martha return home after a party. Martha is the daughter of the president of the university where her husband teaches. Their first names suggest George and Martha Washington, the first President and First Lady of the United States.

George is in his late forties and his wife is six years older, in her early fifties. Where he is somewhat cynical and world-weary, she is fiery and vulgar. She has invited a young couple back with them: Nick, a twenty-something biology lecturer at the university, and his wife Honey, a plain-looking woman also in her twenties.

The first act, ‘Fun and Games’, sees Martha trying to seduce Nick while humiliating both her husband and, to an extent, Honey. As she gets more drunk, Honey grows bolder and asks George and Martha when their son will be coming home.

Doubts are raised over whether George is the biological father of the couple’s son, and Martha reveals that her father had discounted George as a potential candidate to succeed him as president of the university because he isn’t good enough. Honey rushes off to the toilet to be sick, as she has drunk too much.

The second act of the play is titled ‘Walpurgisnacht’, after the witches’ feast or sabbath. Nick confides to George that he only married Honey because she had a phantom pregnancy and he felt he had to do the honourable thing. The two men talk at length, before Nick makes a comment about getting Martha in a corner and ‘mounting’ her.


Martha then seeks to provoke maximum embarrassment in her husband by dancing suggestively with Nick and telling Nick and Honey that her father stopped George from publishing a novel he’d written, about a boy who murders his parents – a book which George insists was autobiographical.

George turns increasingly nasty, decreeing that they should play a party game he calls ‘Get the Guests’. He mockingly re-enacts Honey’s phantom pregnancy, using the information Nick confided in him to taunt them and sow conflict. In response, Martha tries to seduce Nick again, taking him off to the kitchen so they can ‘hump’ there. George confides that his and Martha’s son is, in fact, dead.

The third act, ‘The Exorcism’, begins with Martha alone; when Nick enters, she accuses him of being a ‘flop’ just like her husband. George tells them that there is one more game to play: ‘bringing up baby’.

He and Martha pay tribute to their son, on his twenty-first birthday, before George tells his wife that their son has died in a car crash. When she demands to see the telegram announcing this news, he claims he has eaten it. George sings a song, ‘Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf’, as the curtain falls.

Analysis

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is often analysed as a response to a specific moment in US history: in 1962, when the play premiered, John F. Kennedy was President, and the United States had a confidence in itself as the leading world superpower. At the same time, tensions with the USSR, particularly over Cuba, led to uncertainty over the future.


American life and self-confidence, which had perhaps been at its peak in the 1960s, was beginning to look like a double-edged sword: cosy and comfortable on the outside, but playing host (as it were) to some darker and more worrying secrets and anxieties.

Albee’s play brilliantly dramatises these, reducing them to a domestic setting centred on middle-class America. The names of the two leads, George and Martha, take us back to the founding of the United States and its first President; this further supports the notion that the play should be read as being ‘about’ America, as well as the lives of individual middle-class Americans.

Edward Albee wrote in the New York Times in 1962 that he was ‘deeply offended’ when he learned he was becoming associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. As he argued in an essay, ‘Which Theatre is the Absurd One’, one could argue that absurdist theatre is actually more realist, and closer to reality, than so-called ‘naturalist’ or traditional theatre, which was reliant on conventions which failed to reflect actual life.

So whereas naturalist theatre offers itself as a ‘slice of life’, absurdist drama tends to use dream-like rituals and allegories; whereas naturalist drama follows the rational and logical chain of cause and effect (one character does something; another character reacts as one would expect), absurdist theatre does not have to subscribe to such a rational linearity of plot.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with its strange party games and rituals and its refusal to develop in terms of plot and character, is therefore an emblematic example of absurdism. The ritualistic element is even apparent in the pagan and religious titles given to the different acts of the play, e.g., ‘Exorcism’.


Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the question of whether George and Martha actually have a son at all. Like Honey’s phantom pregnancy, the sense we’re left with, by the end of the play, is that he never existed at all: he, too, was a phantom, conjured by George and Martha as a focal point for their dysfunctional marriage.

And if we view Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as an absurdist allegory for America at a particular point in its history, the early 1960s, the son that doesn’t exist might be analysed as a symptom of the country’s anxieties over its future.

Just as the couple have no children yet their imaginary son is the heart and soul of their conflicted relationship, so America is looking to its future – the space race which Kennedy had begun the decade by championing – while ignoring the problems and challenges closer to home.

Edward Albee’s original title for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was ‘Exorcism’, which he ended up using as the title for the final act of the play. The eventual title came from a bar which Albee frequented, where patrons would leave graffiti, written in soap, on a large mirror. Albee saw someone had riffed on ‘who’s afraid of the big bad wolf’ (from ‘Little Red Riding Hood’) and daubed ‘who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf’, a reference to the modernist writer, and Albee made a mental note of the phrase, thinking it would make a good title for