Every remotely seasoned political insider in Washington is astonished that author Michael Wolff, who once wrote an unflattering biography of media baron Rupert Murdoch, was given the run of the White House for almost a year.
But the 64-year-old has been a fixture of the New York media scene for decades, making a living mostly off the lives of the famous, the powerful and the rich, writing mostly for USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, Vanity Fair and New York Magazine. In a 2004 profile of Wolff in The New Republic, writer Michelle Cottle described him as willing to "say absolutely anything about anybody".
On Friday on the Today show, he said: "I certainly said what was ever necessary to get the story."
Past articles show that he has been critical of anti-Trump media coverage. But it was a cover story on Mr Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter that might have helped clinch his access to the White House.
"I interviewed Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked - or not disliked - the piece I wrote," he wrote in The Hollywood Reporter last week.
"'Great cover!' his press assistant, Ms Hope Hicks, e-mailed me after it came out (it was a picture of a belligerent Trump in mirrored sunglasses)," he wrote.
After the election, Wolff suggested to Mr Trump that he would like access to the White House "to just watch and write a book".
Mr Trump apparently did not say no. This narrative has been challenged. The President tweeted on Friday: "I authorised Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book.
"Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don't exist. Look at this guy's past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!"
"Sloppy Steve" is the President's new nickname for former top strategist Stephen Bannon, who was quoted in the book as saying unflattering things about Mr Trump, and potentially digging a deeper hole for him in the context of a Special Counsel's investigation into whether anyone on his campaign team colluded with elements linked to the Russian government, to help his election chances.
Wolff wrote in The Hollywood Reporter: "Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the President meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around."
Analysts say Mr Trump's inattention to details, plus an easily flattered ego, and his comfort level with the celebrity media industry that Wolff is from may have led to the writer's access to the White House. On Friday, the President tweeted: "Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book."
His lawyers tried to stop the book from being distributed, but the move has backfired.
The book sold out within minutes wherever it became available.
"Where do I send the box of chocolates?" Wolff playfully asked on the Today show.
