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

Wolff has moved onto the bizarre events of CPAC, the conference that was held in February, soon after Donald Trump rose to the presidency. Again, much of this re-treads old ground but is useful in doing so.

While we're thinking about CPAC, you should read some of the late Feliks Garcia's brilliant reporting from there. It was among his last work for The Independent, and it was among his greatest, too.

Wolff takes CPAC as a defining moment not just for Trump but for the Republican establishment and the US right more generally. He notes that the white supremacist Richard Spencer was thrown out of the conference; but with a disbelief and an apathy that demonstrated that he realised that his ideas were already taking hold inside. That could be seen in the grand, extreme pronouncements of Steve Bannon from the stage, for instance – again, that speech was brilliant captured by Feliks in his reports from the ground.

The book talks about Richard Spencer's attempts to cast Donald Trump – who spoke at CPAC – as similar to him, at least intellectually. He might not be an outright and explicit racist in the way that Spencer is, he said, but he was at least receptive to such ideas.

It's not clear whether this is true of Trump. Because once again there's not much said about what Trump's ideas really are. Is that because there's nothing there, or because there's something very dark there? We don't know – at least yet.

Is Trump an anti-Semite? That's the question Wolff is posing at the beginning of a chapter about his relationship with Goldman Sachs. It's one that is particularly troubling for his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has received criticism over his apparent support for Donald Trump and his sometimes unclear views on Israel and Jewish people.

On the one hand, Trump has at least flirted with movements that are explicit in their anti-Semitism. He has refused to decry David Duke, the head of the KKK; his father was an often avowed hater of Jewish people; and he has associated himself with the rise of the far-right in Europe.

On the other, Trump seemed to be impressed by a specific kind of Jewish person. He was friends with Carl Icahn and other high-profile Jews, and indeed his daughter-in-law has become the first Jew in the White House. It's that side of him that Kushner attempted to encourage, Wolff writes, bringing in the kind of tough-guy Jews he knew – Goldman ones.

Another moment that seems so distant it's almost impossible, now, but actually happened less than a year ago: Remember when Donald Trump gave his speech to the joint session of Congress, and everyone loved it? That was the work of a coalition of not only Javanka but some other parts of the White House, who together declared there would be a total reset and an attempt to exclude Steve Bannon and his allies from influencing Trump. They wrote Bannon – both the man and his ideas  – out of the speech. And the media loved it, showering him with praise and giving him his best time yet in the White House.

It was an important moment for the powers at work in the White House: it crystallised the control of Jared and Ivanka, in contrast with Steve Bannon. But here we get some discussion of ideas – for at least a brief moment, the new strategy proposed by Javanka appeared to be working, by focusing on common ground and not on division. Bannon didn't like that, Wolff notes; casting himself as a Cassandra to whom nobody would listen, despite his certainty that the new strategy would lead to doom.

Tony Blair has arrived. He's described as one of Jared Kushner's "many new patrons" – the president's son-in-law apparently having both a knack for and an interest in cultivating older, powerful men to be his friends. Jared and Ivanka had a long and sometimes strange connection to Blair, with Ivanka Trump becoming one of Wendi Deng's best friends, and Deng being good friends with the Blairs.

That all adde up to a meeting in February during which Blair attempted to "prove his usefulness to the White House", Wolff reports in a passage that Blair himself has strongly disputed. In order to do so, he suggested that there was a chance that the British had spied on the Trump campaign and maybe even Trump himself. It's not clear where it came from, and it's been suggested that it isn't even true, but this is the part that dragged the British and Blair into the book when it was revealed.

Wolff suggests that the mention of tapping from Blair, if it happened, is also what got Trump thinking about the potential he was being plotted against by the intelligence community. It's that which begun the now infamous run of tweets in which he claimed Obama had his "wires tapped" and that he might have interfered with the election by doing so.

Here's our report on those tweets from the time. And here's our report on the Department of Justice saying there is no truth in them.

We know that Trump found the details of Obamacare somewhat boring, and more difficult to read than he'd expected. But Wolff suggests another reason for his distaste towards the details of healthcare law: he suffers from various "physical phobias (for instance, he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese", and so "personally found health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful subject".

Otherwise, Wolff's account of healthcare is largely what you'd expect by now. It came down to a battle between Bannon, who saw it as an issue on which he was taking an "absolutist base position"; and the more careerist, shiny presentation of Paul Ryan and the rest of the Republican leadership. Others in the White House like Kushner took the traditional Democrat view.

Again, Trump is depicted as having very little concern for policy, or even the details of politics. He is simply a puppet being grabbed at by various forces, oscillating between a commitment to his base and an interest in sheen and flattery.

It was the tussle between those various forces that at least initially caused the healthcare votes to fail. Everybody was concerned with winning the president around; nobody cared about actually counting whether he and his party might have the votes to push through the legislation they wanted to.

Why does Trump hate Comey so much? Partly, it's obvious: the FBI director chose to publicly announce in March that his organisation was investigating whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia. But the sheer intensity of that hate might be as much a personal thing as anything else, Wolff suggests; Trump had laid on his best moves to try and seduce Comey, and invested a lot of time and effort into doing so, but despite all of that he still chose to drop the campaign in it and potentially blow up the White House.

We're into the downfall of Bannon, and the thought process that led him there. Wolff concentrates on this at length – it seems fairly clear he has had some very deep conversations with the president's aide – and the outcome is clear, if extreme.

Bannon believes that the split between red and blue states in the US – between Trump country and not-Trump country – isn't just a philosophical difference or business-as-usual. Instead, it's a zero-sum, deadly showdown: one side will win, and the other will lose. Bannon's mission in the White House was to make sure that was his people, Wolff suggests.

That approach came into conflict with the more metropolitan view of the White House faction united under Jared and Ivanka. And his big fear was that they would win.

That contest, Wolff reports, wasn't really between two sets of people but between the two sides of Trump. There was a president as seen and controlled by him, and another one; and the central dispute was which of them would rule the country. As March came to an end, it seemed that it wouldn't be Bannon's side.

Onto the April airstrike on Syria, launched on the Trump presidency's 74th day. Wolff makes the case that this was one of the most important, testing moments of the presidency: the point at which the repeated warnings about the president's ability to make a cool head were questioned.

What's more, it was an opportunity for advisers to find out what he actually thought about foreign policy, the book claims. Nobody really knew what he felt about the US's place on the world stage, and how its military should act.

For those reasons, the chemical weapon attack on Khan Sheikhoun became a litmus test – of the new president's normality, and what form that normality might take. But being normal was the key, and in Wolff's account almost the entire White House assembled to try and encourage him to do so, in one way or another.

They – primarily Ivanka and Dina Powell – did that by assembling a presentation of pictures and information about the chemical weapon attack. It worked, and it won him around, eventually leading Trump to encourage the military to launch a missile strike at a Syrian airfield.

(Again, the focus on Bannon and Bannonism: Wolff says that at this moment the president's advisor saw "Trumpism melting before his eyes". He was being won round by emotions, by presentations, by feelings; and using them to decide to become an interventionist. He was in the situation room when the attack was launched, but is described as being disgusted and revolted by the "phoniness of the fucking thing".)