WASHINGTON It was just a few days after Michael Wolffs book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House had sent Washington into an uproar . Novelist and journalist Kurt Andersen was thinking about his friend, the late New York Times media writer David Carr.

Andersen was trying to figure out how Wolff had pulled off the biggest journalistic caper of the Trump era thus far. Here was a journalist with a complicated reputation, a writer who had previously published a critical book on Rupert Murdoch (with the conservative media barons approval). So how did Wolff gain an all-access pass to Donald Trump s inner circle and the White House? What were Stephen Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer thinking?

On the subject of being a pain in Trumps ass, Andersen is an expert of some renown. He was one of the founding editors of Spy magazine, which baited Trump constantly during the tycoons vulgarian heyday. In our phone interview on Sunday morning, Andersen kept coming back to a 2004 New Republic profile of Wolff by Michelle Cottle. In the piece, Carr offered his own theory of Wolffs abilities, and of why everyone around him always seems so on edge.

Michael will say anything about anybody, Carr said. Hes fearless in a way that people attribute to sociopathology but that I always thought was a business strategy.

Everythings a transaction with him, Carr went on to say. Theres no unalloyed moment with Michael. Youre always on the record and performing. I think people dont like him because they have to be careful around him.

So this is where we start, too. With caution. A disclaimer.

Andersen: Ive had a long, perfectly friendly relationship with Michael Wolff in which he has written nicely about me, written not nicely about me and you know, thats the nature of life in journalism. And I have never felt so betrayed or ill-used or anything that I wouldnt say hi to him and talk to him if I ran into him tonight.

But David [Carr] said in that [TNR] piece, he said something like, I think people dont like him because they have to be careful around him because everything is always on the record. And I think theres something to that: this assumed cone of silence among journalists were just talking here, right? Because, conversely, whenever anybody says to me and I have barely been a journalist for many years Well, you know this is off the record, I go, Come on, fucking of course this is off the record, were just talking, were friends, whatever. So I think thats kind of [whats going on] with Michael, that people just feel like hes watching too carefully.

But of course [thats] one of the reasons hes such a good writer and he is a New Journalist in that way that people talked about 50 years ago, of bringing to bear the fiction writer-novelist observation. I havent had any personal experience of him making up stuff. His critics this week have been throwing that around, and its funny that its being thrown around sloppily about his sloppiness, rather than saying, Look, heres this list of things that he did that he got wrong.

HuffPost: Is that just well-known, that everything is potentially on the record with him?

I dont know about that. After a certain point, probably, I guess it was. But its more of a visceral sense that, like, Maybe Im not sure I can relax totally here.

Its not so much like, well, He has put things Ive said off the record and used them. I dont know if its that literally he violated rules in some way. If [off the record] is never discussed and youre talking to a journalist and he or she uses it stupid you. Right?

Theres this implication that he hoodwinked the owner of Breitbart, a media company, Roger Ailes, and Donald Trump? These are people who know the rules.

Its crazy. The bottom line is exactly what you just said. Stephen Bannon and Roger Ailes and Donald Trump what? Innocence? And in the case of all of them? People, come fucking on! Thats the great takeaway. Its King Kong vs. Godzilla vs. Mothra. The extraordinary story about Michael is that they let him in.

How do you think he was able to pull it off, knowing Wolff and Trump?

Of course, as even the Trump supporters are admitting, Oh, it was a chaotic time. But still, somebody there anybody Trump himself, Sean Spicer, anybody whos dealt with the media could spend one minute [vetting Wolff]. I mean, people talked about Why didnt he call his friend Rupert Murdoch and ask him, for instance.

One imagines that this long game of flattery that Michael obviously has practiced before, practiced obviously with Murdoch, and now with Bannon and Trump, during 2016, writing nice pieces about em and taking the shit that people gave him for writing nice pieces and normalizing Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon well, thats how he did it, I guess.

I dont know about Bannon. But Trump is as insanely, self-destructively prone to being flattered as we have already thought and [as he] has been made out to be and interestingly, of course, as he thinks in his experience other people are.

The way that Trump flatters you and hates you the next second and then flatters you he has that idea. And of course, like so much with Donald Trump, he is prone to it himself. And so I guess thats it. And I guess Sean Spicer, this Washington apparatchik, what did he know? The president likes this guy or Bannon likes this guy. I guess it was that.

But also, just as a New York media figure, Wolffs status played to Trumps ego.

Who knows? Hed done a piece about him in The Hollywood Reporter during the campaign that [Trump] liked. And who knows how familiar Trump was over the last 40 years with Michael Wolff?

Its like Annie Leibovitz wants to take my picture. Its maybe Trumps version of, Oh, Bob Woodward wants to come in here and write a book about my administration, sure.

I dont think someone like New Yorker editor David Remnick or Woodward would get through the door. They are too intellectual.

Correct. And again, Ive never seen their tradecraft up close, although I know David. I presume they dont do the flattery action and by-any-means-necessary-lets-get-in-there that Michael surely did, and I saw him last night on television saying he did.

Do you have a problem with that?

I dont know. Well, it depends on what you mean by that. If its a matter of saying, The media has been so terrible to you and saying they are just out to get you, no theres nothing wrong with that at all. Come on. And its Donald Trump, who brags [using] lies and hyperbole and all the rest to get over and make the sale.

The other thing I thought of that is so relevant to this is Janet Malcolms book about Dr. [Jeffrey] MacDonald every journalist knows that hes a confidence man and playing up peoples vanity and all that. This is totally that.

And, of course, when that book came out 30 years ago, that was controversial and people said, Janet, what are you saying? But then I think it became uncontroversial and true. People understood that.

Its just extraordinary on the nuts-and-bolts level that the White House didnt say, OK, but you cant publish this until were out of office. That would be easy, and who knows if Michael would have said yes or no. I guess nobody said that because thats not one of their defenses.

What do you attribute Wolffs success to?

Hes a really good, interesting, vivid, New Journalistic, fiction-like writer who calls a spade a spade. And thats the other thing, when all these Washington journalists say, We all knew this and we all reported this, these things. Sure. But in dribs and drabs, and not with the kind of voice that somebody not on the beat and not writing for The New York Times can bring to bear, which is what he did.

Its a different M.O., and properly a different M.O., than what Maggie Haberman should use at The New York Times.

Why is he so successful? Because hes not polite. Rather than softening things and not burning bridges because hes on the beat, hell burn the bridge. And because hes simply a good writer, says things with piquancy and vividness, going for the jugular in ways that other journalists, because they are nicer, because they write for The New York Times, because whatever, because they have to maintain their relationship in a way they think, wouldnt do.

What Carr said in that Cottle piece, that people say Michael is sociopathic but its just a business strategy I think thats right. Its not personal. He is telling the truth as he sees it, which of course [is] what all writers and journalists are supposed to do, and doesnt worry too much about burning bridges here and there. And yes, most of us who have ever been or are in that profession wouldnt do it the same way, for reasons some of which are noble and some of which are just temperamental. Hes willing to go for it.

Complaining about Michaels methods is like complaining about any sausage-making of journalism that goes on. But especially 50 years into New Journalism and 30 years into tabloidification, to complain about Michaels methods its not 1979 anymore. Were not in journalism school, and things have changed.

Some of the stuff Washington reporters questioned actually came from a party Wolff held at his home.

Having just seen The Post , its the kind of clubby intimacy that we imagine existed, did exist back with [Ben] Bradlee and Jack Kennedy. And here it is happening again, and unlike that, where until the Pentagon Papers come along you cover for them and its clubby and incestuous here [its] like, Come to my house for dinner and in a few months Im going to explode things by writing a book about it. Its nutty.

The difference is that his book didnt come out after the administration, it came out after the first year. Thats unprecedented.

Thats it. That is exactly right. And along with, well, all of the unprecedented mess about Donald Trump, including tweeting this morning that hes a very stable genius. The rules are different.

If anything, people like Woodward repeatedly [were] criticized for holding things. Wait, you are an editor of The Washington Post and youre not reporting this in The Washington Post? Well, Michael cant be accused of that.

Wolff maybe had a sense of moral outrage.

I believe Michael is as horrified as any sane person should be about the idea of Donald Trump being president sure. But I dont think theres much earnest-like, Well, I was going to be nice to him, and I was going to wait, but my God, this is a crisis eh, ah, no, I dont think so.

Youd think the Trump administration would have had a dossier on Wolff.

That they let him in is a measure of their unfathomable incompetence. Then the reporting in The Washington Post that the day it was all happening, they thought they had more time what? What? You have a whole White House communications staff that knows this book is coming. And they didnt have a copy of the book, they were scrambling to get a book. I mean, what?

How does this fit in with your book Fantasyland , about the countrys belief in fake news? With Trumps hatred of the mainstream press, how do you think Wolff is able to gain access?

He played to the empirical sloppiness and wishfulness that I talk about in Fantasyland and how everything is politicized. He wrote a nice piece about Trump, he wrote a nice piece about Bannon, hes on our side, and hes going to be on our side. Its just that. Its believing what you want to believe and what is convenient to believe without bringing any reasonable sense of rigor to the game.

What it really reminded me of, to tell you the truth, was this other book I published this fall with Alec Baldwin this parody memoir of Trump. Holy cow, talk about life imitating fiction. It has been extraordinary.

How did it remind you of that book?

Because what that book is its called You Cant Spell America Without Me . Its as if Trump is writing a memoir of his first year in office. That was an exaggerated version of what I imagine is going on in Trumps head if he sat down and spoke his memoir into his iPhone. Thats what it is. Todays thing of him actually writing in a tweet , Im, like, really smart he actually did the comma like...

I thought he was channeling Alec Baldwin with that.

Exactly. I had fictionally written about him firing [former FBI Director James] Comey weeks before he did. And Alec goes, Well, youre a prophet, you saw it coming! But its this stuff. Its the stuff in Michaels book and then these tweets today. Its like the distance between the fictional depiction of him as a loon and literally going mad, which is how the book ends, is getting narrower and narrower and narrower. He hasnt yet built a fort for himself in Trump Tower and wont come out and threatened to shoot people with his Secret Servicemans gun a thing that happens in our fictional version but its not that much beyond.

[Wolffs] book has brought up these questions, in a still more general way, of his mental fitness. And then the guy comes out and says , Oh, Im a totally stable genius.

For the last six months or so, or maybe year, every time he did something like that, as I was working on this fictional account, I just retweeted his tweet and said, The greatest self-parodist of all time.

Theres a scene in Wolffs book where he wants to lock his door and gets in a thing with the Secret Service.

Precisely... So there you go. All he now has to do is steal a guys gun and start shooting up the place.

This interview been condensed and edited for clarity.