Michael Wolff dropped a bombshell on Friday night, hinting to Bill Maher that President Donald Trump is having an extramarital affair “right now.” All you have to do to figure out who it’s with, the Fire and Fury author said, is “read between the lines.”
Either Wolff is just looking for ways to sell even more copies of his blockbuster book, or he actually has real dirt on the president’s sex life. After his appearance Monday night on The Daily Show, it’s starting to feel more and more like the former.
Host Trevor Noah tried his best to get answers, leading to one of the stranger exchanges in late-night history.
As Noah said to Wolff, “You insinuated, or said out loud, that Donald Trump is possibly having an affair with someone in the White House. Where do you get this from?”
“You just have to read the book,” Wolff replied.
“No, but I read the book,” Noah said. “I don't know where you got that from in the book.”
“You have to somewhat read between the lines and you have to see,” Wolff said, unwilling to go further. “I’m not going—just, the book, it’s—it’s there.”
“But it’s not there.”
“It is there.”
“You’re really good at selling the book, man,” Noah finally said, before ending the interview.
Earlier in their talk, as hosts like Stephen Colbert have done before him, Noah questioned Wolff’s journalistic standards. “What do you intend the book to be?” he asked. “Is this a journalistic foray into the White House or just a salacious account of the juicy tidbits of the inner workings of what’s going on?”
Wolff said he thinks “those are the same thing in this instance,” explaining that what he saw and heard while hanging around the West Wing was “flabbergasting.” He called Trump and his team the “greatest bunch of knuckleheads I think that have ever been assembled in one place.”
The author’s biggest takeaway about Trump one year into his presidency? “He’s stupid.” When the applause for that line died down, Wolff added, “He’s also bald.”