The wildest things we learned from books about Trump's White House in 2018
- Several books from high-profile authors and former Trump officials were released in 2018.
- The books made dozens of wild claims or revealed bombshell information.
Among the many thorns in President Donald Trump's side have been books written by prominent journalists or former administration officials that have painted him in an unflattering light.
Several books released in 2018 revealed quite a bit of information about Trump and his administration, the wildest of which are detailed here.
Gary Cohn would snatch documents off Trump's desk.
When legendary journalist Bob Woodward released his highly anticipated book about the Trump administration, he revealed some eye-popping details about the state of the White House.
In the book, titled "FEAR: Trump in the White House," Woodward revealed that Gary Cohn, the White House's former chief economic adviser, would snatch documents off Trump's desk to prevent what he viewed as bad decisions.
Woodward wrote that Cohn "stole a letter off Trump's desk" that would have withdrawn the US from the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS).
Omarosa claims there are tapes of Trump using the N-word.
Omarosa Manigault-Newman, the former villain on Trump's reality show "The Apprentice," who later went on to have a short-lived career in the White House, claims tapes exist of their time at NBC in which Trump uses the N-word.
"They all told me that President Trump hadn't just dropped a single N-word bomb," Manigault-Newman wrote in her tell-all memoir, "Unhinged."
"He'd said it multiple times throughout the show's taping during off-camera outtakes, particularly during the first season of 'The Apprentice,'" Manigault-Newman added.
Most Republicans close to Trump and even those who opposed him dismissed Manigault-Newman's claim — along with many other parts of her book — as a fantasy.
Trump consoled grieving military families.
Another tidbit from "FEAR" by Bob Woodward was that during phone calls with the families of US servicemembers who died, Trump would make every effort to console them, including fabricating stories.
"He's not that guy," Woodward quoted former White House Strategist Steve Bannon as saying. "He's never really been around the military. He's never been around [a] military family. Never been around death."
"l'm looking at his picture — such a beautiful boy," Trump said in one instance where he was speaking with the family of a fallen soldier. "Where did he grow up? Where did he go to school? Why did he join the service? I've got the record here," Trump said. "There are reports here that say how much he was loved. He was a great leader."
But Woodward wrote that Trump "was just making it up" and "he knew what the families wanted to hear."
Trump nearly sparked war with North Korea over Twitter.
Another revelation from Woodward was that Trump could have ignited a war with North Korea over Twitter.
Trump reportedly crafted a tweet to threaten to pull all US personnel from South Korea, which could have signaled the US was planning an imminent attack.
"In that moment there was a sense of profound alarm in the Pentagon leadership that, my God, one tweet and we have reliable information that the North Koreans are going to read this as 'an attack is imminent,'" Woodward said in a CBS interview.
Back-channel communications with the North Koreans avoided the potential disaster and the tweet was never sent, according to Woodward.
Steve Bannon called Trump Tower meeting "treasonous" and "unpatriotic."
In Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury," the author wrote that former White House strategist Steve Bannon called the Trump Tower meeting between Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, Donald Trump, Jr., and a Russian lawyer "unpatriotic" and "treasonous."
"The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers," Wolff quoted Bannon as saying in the book. "They didn't have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately."
Other areas of the book were dismissed as fabrications, to which Wolff himself said he cannot be sure if all of the claims are true.
John Kelly fumed over Trump's handling of the Charlottesville incident.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly became enraged with how Trump handled the protests by white nationalists and the murder that followed during counter-protests, Woodward also revealed in "FEAR."
Woodward wrote that after Trump's comments that "both sides" were to blame for the chaos, Kelly told White House Economic Advisor Gary Cohn he wanted to offer Trump his "resignation letter and shoved it up his ass six different times."
Kelly denied such comments and more through White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.