US President Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, has revealed the mechanics behind her father's unusual hair-do in an explosive new book that has roiled the White House and provoked unprecedented fury from the president.
Several extracts from American author Michael Wolff's forthcoming book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House were published on Thursday, offering a lacerating portrait of an accidental presidency in a dysfunctional White House.
Trump, described by his spokeswoman as "furious" at the "tabloid fiction" novel, released a blistering statement to say former chief strategist and campaign head, Steve Bannon, who gave several interviews to Wolff that mocked the president's inner circle, had "lost his mind".
Bannon said Ivanka Trump was "dumb as a brick", her husband and White House adviser Jared Kushner was "greasy" and Donald Trump jnr's infamous Trump Tower meeting with a high-ranking Russian lawyer was "treasonous".
Trump's personal lawyer fired off cease-and-desist letters to Bannon, Wolff and the book's publisher, demanding that the book be pulled and an apology issued to the president.
In one extract, Wolff writes that those around Trump would often ridicule him including "dutiful daughter Ivanka" who "wasn't above a chortle with her friends about her father's infamous orange comb-over".
"She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate - a contained island after scalp reduction surgery - surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the centre and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.
"The colour, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men - the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump's orange-blond colour."
Wolff also writes that Ivanka and husband Jared Kushner accepted positions in the West Wing "over the advice of almost everyone they knew" because of the possibility that Ivanka might be president one day.
Among other jaw-dropping anecdotes is a claim that Trump chooses to eat McDonald's because he has a longtime fear of being poisoned.
"One reason why he liked to eat at McDonald's - nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade."
Wolff says the fear sees Trump stripping down his own bed and ordering housekeeping not to touch his toothbrush and other personal belongings.
He continues: "If [Trump] was not having his six-thirty dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls - the phone was his true contact point with the world - to a small group of friends, among them most frequently [longtime friend] Tom Barrack, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another."
Barrack released a statement saying quotes attributed to him in the book are "completely and utterly false" and he was never interviewed by Wolff. He said the president "is my longtime friend" and someone for whom he has "inordinate respect."
Wolff paints Trump as puerile and disinterested, a man who doesn't like reading anything long, can't settle on a political agenda and is unable to manage a warring cast of advisers who spend their days undermining each other.
In one scene, Katie Walsh, formerly a deputy chief-of-staff, is quoted as saying that dealing with Trump is "like trying to figure out what a child wants".
In another book scene, Sam Nunberg, a former campaign aide who was ultimately fired, describes trying to explain the Constitution to the president. "I got as far as the Fourth Amendment," the book quotes Nunberg as saying, "before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head."
The White House has reacted angrily, saying that most of the book is untrue and Wolff was only permitted into the White House on 20 occasions, spending less than a few minutes interviewing the president.
Wolff responded in a column in The Hollywood Reporter explaining how he obtained such unprecedented access to the inner workings of the White House.
He said, after writing a profile on Trump in 2016 that was well received, Trump seemed somewhat receptive to the idea of Wolff coming to the White House as a "fly on the wall" with a view to writing a book.
"Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around - checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the 'system,' and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch."
