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

Wolff details at some length Trump's attitude to the media – which is based on beliefs in which Wolff sees there being some truth. It upsets the president that he is written about in a way that no other president has been, for instance – which Wolff argues is true. That can be seen, for instance, in the way that the New York Times covers the president, devoting time to detailing the all-too-human parts of the goings-on inside the White House. It wrote last year, for instance, that Trump is often wearing a bathrobe; Trump disputes that he ever did wear one, but the book argues also that no president has ever been subject to speculation about what he wears when he goes to sleep before.

For a book that relies on such detailed, intimate, collections of information from inside the White House, people seem to have spent a lot of time voicing their concern over leaks. (Expressing those worries to a journalist who could end up writing them down seems strange, but then again the impression is of a White House where there is only one thing worse than leaking – and that's not leaking, since someone might leak about your first.) The picture that Wolff presents is one of intense paranoia, about what information will make it out to the media, who will be providing it and how it will get there.

Indeed, to continue the below, everything, it seems is about the media. Wolff depicts various White House figures like Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer trying to put together a response to the Russia investigation – and coming to the conclusion that it's not worth saying anything, and the cause of the problem is not so much the suggestion of treason or misbehaviour but actually the media's obsession with writing about it. As ever, the Trump White House is locked in a strange position, according to the book – obsessed with the media, and feeling itself oppressed by it.

In a break from our read-through, Trump reacts to the book, in expected fashion:

"Well, now that collusion with Russia is proving to be a total hoax and the only collusion is with Hillary Clinton and the FBI/Russia, the Fake News Media (Mainstream) and this phony new book are hitting out at every new front imaginable," he just posted on Twitter. "They should try winning an election. Sad!"

(Interestingly, that's about where I am in the book: the obsession with fake news and Russia. More to come, including potentially whatever has upset Trump so much.)

Wolff is working his way through the various players and theories at work in the Russia story. It's comprehensive work – though it doesn't necessarily offer anything new, it's another situation where the flow of news can be so relenting that it's sometimes good to take a little step back and just understand the fullness of what has happened. At least so far, Wolff doesn't seem to have his own view, or at least doesn't want to express it – the Russia story is complex and mysterious, and his account of it is less an attempt to pass judgement than show the various, often conflicting attempts by others to do so.

Wolff introduces yet another character to the endless (and sometimes dramatic) list of people involved: Katie Walsh. The then deputy chief of staff is described as a perfect bureaucrat: more concerned with organisation itself than what it might be being used for, and a perfect foil for the tendency towards chaos shown by Trump and much of his White House.

She's a useful person to explore the character of the president through, as a result. She's one of the many members of staff tasked with ensuring the president is properly managed – inverting the normal flow from the president down – and actually doing so is described as a challenge. He won't read, for instance, preferring TV; he wouldn't listen, either, preferring to talk rather than be talked to, since he trusts his expertise more than anybody else's.

One notable thing in this book is that you get the sense Trump doesn't have many thoughts about policy at all, or at least communicated them. (At the very least, he doesn't appear to have communicated them to Wolff.) For instance, when he lays out the three most powerful people in the early White House – Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner – his description is of three men, all of different philosophies, each united in their attempts to make Trump see their way. There is no discussion, however, of where Trump's thoughts or allegiances might be – it's as if he's just a stick swaying in the wind, with little concern for his own thoughts, and maybe even lacking in the capacity to have any.

We're left with a vision of those three men fighting with each other. Some of that is done directly to the president, and Wolff gives a clear vision of how each of their strategies work: Bannon through raw power, Priebus through flattery via the Republican leadership, and Kushner through connections to the business world. But those strategies pale in significance when compared to the really powerful method being used in the White House: leaking. Everyone is leaking about everyone else; everyone is accusing everyone of leaking about everyone else.

We're halfway into the book, and the vice president has arrived. Mike Pence has been sorely lacking, and that might be by design – Wolff depicts Kushner as being intentionally, strategically dull; he refuses to leak or play the other games of the Trump administration. So nobody talks about him; even a book that hopes to depict the inside of the White House has mostly ignores the man who is supposed to be the second most powerful person there.