Fire and Fury summary: All the most explosive moments in new book from inside Trump's White House

During the transition, Trump kept asking to have his family join the team. "In defiance of law and tone, and everybody's disbelieving looks, the president seemed intent on surrounding himself in the White House with his family." All of the Trumps would come, apart from Melania, he said, and would take on roles similar to those they had in the Trump Organization.

Nobody was there to stop him. That is, until famous Trump supporter and media personality Ann Coulter took him aside and said: "Nobody is apparently telling you this. But you can't. You just can't hire your children," Wolff writes.

But he continued to insist that he was able to call on his family's help. Eventually, he relented on his desire to have Jared Kushner as his chief-of-staff, but as we know many of the extended family of Trumps continue to occupy important places in the White House.

Donald Trump has claimed that the Billy Bush tape – a video that he appeared to initially recognise the legitimacy of – might actually be fake, according to both Wolff and numerous reports before the book came out too. He has suggested that the tape "really wasn't me", and when pressed whether he meant that it was unfair to judge him on a singular event, made clear that he meant that:

No, it wasn't me. I've been told by people who understand this stuff about how easy it is to alter these things and put in voices and completely different people.

Wolff doesn't name the friendly cable anchor that he claims Trump made those remarks too. But it is entirely in line with what he has been saying elsewhere – something that led Access Hollywood to address the claims on air, during a segment where hosts made clear that they believed the tape was real and that the president had actually already apologised for the behaviour on it.

We're hearing a lot about the explosive claims made in the book, and I'm trying to focus on those mostly here. But it's worth noting that it's definitely worth reading even if you've picked up all the good stuff in excerpts and readings like this one (and whether or not you believe them): alongside all that, it's simply a very good telling of a story that we all know something about, but perhaps haven't stepped back and thought about.

Wolff, for instance, just related the story of the then President-elect's bizarre press conference at Trump Tower, during which he surrounded himself with piles of (potentially empty) binders that would clear up his business ventures and proceeded to rattle on about the dossier that claimed he had engaged in lewd behaviour while in Russia. There's nothing in there that hasn't come from other reports, and which you probably don't already know – but it seems like so long ago, and it's sometimes easy to forget just how recently some very bizarre stuff has been going on.

A number of people point out that Melania wasn't into raising (Steve) Bannon, as I said earlier, but raising Barron (Trump). At least as far as we know. The book is explosive, yes, but hasn't suggested that Donald Trump is Steve Bannon's father, at least not yet. Apologies.

Trump didn't like his own inauguration, writes Wolff. His friend Tom Barrack raised some money to pay for a big spectacular, but he did so with the aim of creating a show that didn't really suit the new president's tastes: he was aiming for "soft sensuality" and "poetic cadence", the book claims, which isn't really an aesthetic associated with Trump.

He wanted his friends to use their influence and encourage some big stars to attend the event, or at least attack them for snubbing it. But they wouldn't, and he got upset because it seemed like they wanted to embarrass him.

So instead we got the vision we now remember: a concert at which Trump was the biggest act, something that he claimed was fine because he could "outdraw any star". That evening was a bit of a squib, if you recall – something that Wolff claims was very upsetting to the president.

But that turned out to be actually quite helpful when the inauguration ceremony came around. Steve Bannon wrote him a very aggressive, very grumpy speech – and Trump's feeling of personally being shunned and unloved meant that he delivered it with conviction.

Putting on my critical hat for a moment: there's a lot of Bannon in this book. It's clear that Wolff has been talking to him, or at least hearing a lot from him. Events are explained through that lens, often – and the story is often as much about how the Breitbart honcho responded to or guided events as the president himself. That's not necessarily a problem, but it's something that inevitably colours some of the other, more spectacular, reports.

Another useful reminder, not of new information but of a story that it's easy to forget. Remember when, in his first act after becoming president, Trump headed to the CIA to try and make friends with them but ended up throwing away his prepared remarks and talking about his intellect? Wolff quotes the remarks, referring to them as "some of the most peculiar remarks ever delivered by an American president":

I know a lot about West Point, I'm a person who very strongly believes in academics. Every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many ways academically – he was an academic genius – and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I'm like a smart person.

...

You know when I was young. Of course I feel young – I feel like I was 30... 35... 39... Somebody said, Are you young? I said, I think I'm young. I was stopping in the final months of the campaign, four stops, five stops, seven stops – speeches, speeches in front of twenty-five, thirty thousand people... fifteen, nineteen thousand. I feel young – I think we're all so young. When I was young we were always winning things in this country. We'd win with trade, we'd win with wars – at a certain age I remembering hearing from one of my instructors, the United States has never lost a war. And then, after that, it's like we haven't won anything. You know the old expression, to the victor belongs the spoils. You remember I always say, keep the oil.

"Who should keep the oil?", Wolff reports a bewildered CIA employee saying at the back of the room.

Wolff goes on to quote yet more of the strange remarks he made on that day. Our contemporary report can be read here, where you'll find yet more of his strange remarks. As ever, there's something in just reading this stuff written down; sometimes, it can feel well-delivered, but when it's written down in a long book, as it is here, it's utterly bewildering.

The full remarks from that day can be found on the White House website, here. The above might not even be the best bit.

Who is Steve Bannon? Wolff keeps asking in various ways. And the answer – the same one that so many other people have found – is: nobody really knows. He claims to have links to Hollywood, but nobody can really trace those in any meaningful ways; while he was there, he seems to have acquired a big stake in Seinfeld and gone to some important meetings, but nobody involved in them can remember him. He was involved in Biosphere 2, a major failed project that now ranks among the worst ideas in the world, stepping in as it fell apart and continued to fall apart even more. Then he got involved in raising finance for an online game, and it's not clear what he did there, either.

The book is very pre-occupied with Bannon's thinking – indeed, so far, it's not actually talked about Trump's politics, and gives Bannon credit for whatever policies or ideas he discusses. But it runs into the same problem as anyone else: nobody is clear who he is, where he came from, or quite how he managed to be one of the only important people to see Trump's success coming, and make the most of it – at least for a while.

Just as a preview of what's to come, I had a flick through the index for some of the stranger and more intriguing stuff mentioned there. Here's what we've got coming up (in, remember, a biography of the president of the United States):

• Chopra, Deepak
• Gamergate
• Gawker
• Mensch, Louise
• Mighty Ducks, The (TV show)
• Ms Universe contest
• Nazi Germany
• North Korea
• Seinfeld
• Spy Magazine
• nightly phone calls
• Wall Street 2
• World Wrestling Entertainment

Notably, Kim Jong-un only appears once in the index. (Bannon, obviously, appears loads.)

Even while we read his book, Michael Wolff is getting in the way with news. He has said that Trump has no credibility and that his staff say he is "like a child", reports the BBC.