“You know he’s watching,” author Michael Wolff stated cryptically as soon as he was seated on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show on Monday. “One of the remaining contacts I have said he asked for my media schedule today. So that might mean that all he’s done today is watch me on television,” added the author of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House or, as President Donald Trump called it on Twitter, “this really boring and untruthful book” written by “a total loser”.

The explosive book became an instant bestseller, revealing distressing insider views of the Trump White House. “It’s the Trump White House,” said Wolff, who admitted he took a few judgement calls, but insisted that it was all true. “Everybody is telling you different stories. Let’s put it this way – everybody is lying in their own particular way because that’s what you do in the Trump White House.”

When Colbert confessed that the book was deeply conflicting and upsetting, in spite of all the potential jokes it offered him as a comedian, and asked how much of it he should believe, Wolff’s response was: “You should believe all of it. That’s the alarming thing, that this is all true.”