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

Onto the White House Correspondent's Dinner, and the 100th day of the Trump presidency. (This is where the book was due to end.)

Trump's relationship with comedy has always been odd. He is bad at jokes; various people in the book call him unfunny. But he did well during his appearance on Saturday Night Live, despite a refusal to prepare and a commitment to improvising when he got there. His strange relationship with humour was what led numerous advisors to ask him to forego the dinner, at which he would be jeered and joked at; instead, he went and sat down for an interview. But throughout the interview, which took place during a trip arranged in part to keep his mind off the dinner, he just kept asking for updates on the jokes that were being told there.

What's Trump's thinking on foreign policy? This book says little except that which makes it less clear – though, of course, a lack of clarity may well be the truth.

He courted Saudi Arabia and its new ruler Mohammed bin Salman, for instance; but that was not necessarily an ideological commitment so much as a desire to have friends across the world and criticise the way previous administrations had dealt with the Middle East.

That, the book claims, is the animating principle of Trumpism: do what the others wouldn't. It's not about policy positions, it's about refusing the policy positions of the past.

And nor is it about nuance, it's about reducing the world to power. There's three kinds of people in the world: friendly powers, enemy powers, and those without any power.

Here's a little insight into how a Trump tweet forms itself, and what it does, via the strange posts he wrote in June about Mika Brzezinski. That post, about how the TV presenter was once "bleeding badly from a facelift" when he saw her, was among the most decried of Trump's various tweets – and a useful instance of what he aims to do with them.

Many such tweets begin their life as a joke insult, Wolff writes, and aren't so much spontaneous as the kind of things that stick and constantly come back up. Over time, they moved from being jokey insults into genuinely held accusations, and then at some point they'd boil over into the officially set down policy of a tweet.

Once such a tweet goes out, and the liberal media expresses its outrage, it solidifies the idea in Trump's head that it was a good thing to do. He might not always realise why they were so upset, but they always were; and likewise the faithful seemed to stay with him and even like him more no matter what he said.

In the end, that tweet – and many others like it – were chalked up as a victory by Trump. And not just for him: "Mike and Joe totally love this. It's a big ratings for them," Wolff quotes the president as saying.

The other two adult Trump children, Don Jr and Eric, haven't had much of a look in so far. (That's probably fo the best for Trump, given they're supposed to have a hands-off approach and look after the businesses.) But here they are.

Wolff describes the two men as being appointed as their fathers "heirs and attendees". They continue to behave largely like children, and are not praised or required for their intelligence or acumen in the same way as Ivanka, meaning that they were mostly left to run errands and projects of their father.

So it's a strange and unlikely coincidence that Don Jr managed to take part in perhaps one of the most pivotal and public moments of the campaign, one that continues to haunt his father's presidency. Because it was him that met with a strange band of people all associated with Russia in Trump Tower, set up after an email exchange that saw the Russians offer a series of damaging information to the Trump campaign.

It's this exchange that led to Bannon's widely reported remarks – the remarks that led to an angry and long statement from Donald Trump and perhaps the reason that the book has made its way to the public today.

"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," Bannon is reported as saying. "Even if you didn't think to do that, and you're totally amoral, and you anted that information, you do it in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people and go through everything and then they verbally come and tell another lawyer in a cut-out, and if you've got something, then you figure out how to dump it down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication. You never see it, you never know it, because you don't need to... But that's the brain trust that they had."

Bannon's remarks are notable because they make clear that people involved with the Trump campaign saw something deeply wrong with the meeting. But they're also notable because of their role in the book: it's probably that which set Bannon and Trump on the warpath, and which allowed this book to become so important.

Scaramucci has appeared. None of it is particularly significant, of course – it's hard to see how a few days spent in the White House could be – but Wolff's account is peppered with funny details. The Mooch's company paid as much as $500,000 for their logo to appear in the film Wall Street 2, and for him to have a cameo; he danced with Muammar Gaddafi at Davos. Despite all of that, he didn't go anywhere, and the campaign repeatedly had to ask itself what to do with the man who had helped it so much in the run-up to the election.

His hiring was encouraged by Javanka, who saw him as one of their own – a New Yorker, a Wall Street man, and very rich. He impressed them even more with his work with the press. And he was able to flatter Trump into giving him a job as the communications chief, reporting to him and displacing Sean Spicer.

Onto North Korea, and the bizarre moment from which the book's name of Fire and Fury comes from. There's very little detail about the country here – very little detail about why Trump promised to unleash fire and fury like the world has never seen, or why it has become such a preoccupation.

But in the book, as in real life, that didn't matter much. Something more dramatic was about to happen: the Unite The Right rally that would see white supremacists take to the streets and one of their number kill an anti-fascist protestor.

On that point, Wolff dwells little on the events, but discusses the strange, contested battle to decide how Trump would respond to them. Bannon pressured him to condemn violence but defend history, something that would allow him not to alienate the far-right but avoid controversy; Javankar and their supporters suggested he should try and be presidential. He went ahead with the latter, but it didn't much work; as is now history, he ended up opting for the former eventually anyway, condemning violence on both sides and decrying media reporting.

We end, as we started, not with Trump, but with Bannon. Wolff reports him speaking in the Breitbart embassy, offering his view of how the Trump presidency will end: a one-third chance Trump would be impeached and have to leave office because of the Mueller investigation; a one-third chance he would resign, perhaps because of a threat to take him down because of the 25th amendment, which gives the power for his cabinet to remove him if he is incapacitated; a one-third chance he would struggle on to the end of his term. He won't have a second one, Bannon said, according to the book.

But Bannon might, it concludes. He is sounding out ways to look at running in 2020; no longer pondering if he were president so much as saying when. He is looking at donors and considering his options, Wolff reports.

Trump is missing from the end of the book all about his White House, really. Wolff ends only by saying he'd been upstaged – not just in this book but in the rest of the media. Staffers, Wolff claims, are concerned that Trump's rambling and repetitions are getting worse, that he is getting even worse at being able to focus. But it ends with perhaps the most hurtful dismissal of all, from Bannon to Trump: he's simply a diversion.

So that's it. The book's over. Stay tuned for my full thoughts, but here are a few sketches after having made my way through the entire thing:

• Trump doesn't really appear in this book. There's intimate, sometimes prurient, details about his private life, but little else. Instead, he's something like weather vane – only really useful as a way of determining who's most powerful and persuasive in the White House at any given time.
• It's really a book about Bannon, and even when it's not about Bannon it is told through him. It begins with him and ends with him. It seems to making the argument that the presidency is him – which is interesting, but means that it's very hard to learn anything from this book about what will happen now that Bannon and Trump have fallen out.
• The Trump White House is a campaigning outfit. It never wanted to win – and it doesn't know how to be a winner. At least that's how Wolff presents it.
• But the fact is that Trump has done things. This doesn't say why they happened, or even necessarily what they are. It describes his reaction to the protests where fascists killed a protestor, for instance; but it doesn't say why he made such a bizarre decision.
• It doesn't really credit Trump with any achievements. It recognises his appeal during the election – including why he won, like his identification with "white trash" – but doesn't say much about how he managed to do that. And the same thing can be said about his rule since he won: he's not supposed to be a good president, but some people (the far-right, stock market bankers) must think he's doing a good job, and that needs to be confronted.
• Last of all, this offers nothing to ether "The Resistance" or Trump's supporters. There's no suggestion about how he will continue to hold onto power, or really how he could be deposed.