Moriarty:
There’s one theory that it was a cover story in the Hollywood Reporter that secured Wolfe this access.
I posted about that ten days ago (in the BBQ Pit) --Hope Hicks was, apparently, the particular West Wing person who was impressed by the “cool” cover. Neither she nor Trump himself, quite obviously, had read the story–which was not flattering to Trump. They both just figured ‘the cover makes Trump look ‘cool’ so the author must be a Trump-supporter ’…which would win for Bad Reasoning Choice of the year, if there weren’t so many other entries!
Supposedly Bannon signed him in some days. Some days, he reportedly had a higher clearance–the ‘blue pass’–than any other reporter. (I’m not seeing that in a reputable story–just in tweets and on message boards, so no link yet.)
I interviewed Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked — or not disliked — the piece I wrote. “Great cover!” his press assistant, Hope Hicks, emailed me after it came out (it was a picture of a belligerent Trump in mirrored sunglasses).
Michael Wolff: My Insane Year Inside Trump's White House
I don’t see the cover itself on the Hollywood Reporter site, so here it is:https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/custom/trumpconversation.jpg
…if the cover artist had depicted Trump as a buffoon–to match the tenor of the actual story–then Wolff would never have gotten his pass to the White House. Because, of course, neither Hope Hicks, nor Trump, actually read the story. But since the cover made Trump look ‘cool,’ Hicks and Trump assumed that anything Wolff wrote, or might write, would also make Trump look ‘cool.’
Thus the importance of the graphic arts in world history.