REUTERS/Daron Dean
President Donald Trump.
- North Korean officials are reportedly reading columnist Michael Wolff's blockbuster book, "Fire and Fury," the tell-all that paints a mostly unflattering picture of a tumultuous Trump-led White House.
- A source told CNN that members of North Korea's government were also reading Trump's co-authored business strategy book, "Art of the Deal."
- The effort looks to be an attempt to understand how Trump operates and how his close associates govern themselves around him.
North Korean officials are reportedly perusing columnist Michael Wolff's blockbuster book, "Fire and Fury," the tell-all that paints a mostly unflattering picture of a tumultuous Trump-led White House, a former diplomat said.
"They were very keen to study Donald Trump when I was there in December," Jonathan Powell, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief of staff, told CNN. "They were reading 'Art of the Deal,' and wanted to discuss the book and what it showed about the president."
"Art of the Deal," a book coauthored by Trump in 1987, was partly a biography and a broad outline of Trump's approach to making deals throughout his business career.
"When I went back at the beginning of this year, they were reading 'Fire and Fury' - all on PDFs, not buying the book itself, and trying to discuss what that told them about Trump too," Powell said.
Based on other reports, members of North Korea's government have been attempting to analyze Trump and decipher his methodology of governing. In 2017, North Korean officials previously reached out to Republican-linked analysts and think tanks in Washington because they "can't figure him out," according to a person familiar with the situation.
"Their number-one concern is Trump," the source said to The Washington Post.
Wolff's "Fire and Fury" took political and media circles around the country by storm after its release in January. It provided a rare behind-the-scene look at pivotal moments throughout Trump's 2016 campaign and the beginning stages of his presidency.
However, critics have questioned some of the wilder claims made in the book and questioned the reliability of some of its sources. Wolff has also admitted that he was not sure if all the claims in the book were true, and that there were times he knew his sources were lying to him.
"Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue," Wolff noted in the book's prologue. "These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book."