The reason they shared these stories is they feel that the president rejects facts and information. It’s like he can’t be bothered with it. And his rejection of a briefing before he went to meet with Prime Minister Modi had terrible consequences.

Modi went from being a person who was trying to have a serious negotiation with Trump about partnership, about how to protect himself from China and Russia and Pakistan. And as a result of the president not knowing that India shares a very significant border with China, Modi began to withdraw a little and, as told to us by aides, viewed Trump as just not serious enough to make a deal with.

Q: You quoted a former Trump Organisation staffer who described Trump’s anger as “scary”. You have both been covering presidents for a long time. Is Trump especially prone to fits of anger compared to other presidents?

Leonnig: It sure feels like it after talking to people over and over again who had similar experiences. Many of these I recounted in the book, but perhaps not all of the ones that we heard.

The time he was yelling at [former Homeland Security Secretary] Kirstjen Nielsen and calling her early in the morning and late at night after watching [Fox Business host] Lou Dobbs, then berating her to adopt and implement the ideas that Lou Dobbs has whispered to him on the phone.

Nielsen tried to explain to the president that some of these ideas were going to break the law or that the department was already doing them.

But sometimes he would call her back in the morning after calling her in the night, and she would say, “Mr President, I haven’t done what you’ve asked yet because everyone in the office is sleeping in the intervening hours and I cannot get any answer for you right now.”

But there were many others who were on the receiving end of the president’s barking. [Former Attorney General] Jeff Sessions being cursed at and told that it was all his fault that a special counsel had been appointed.

[Trump] yelling at the top of his lungs so loud that when people were excused from that room they could hear him through the doors yelling, and were crossing themselves about how glad they were that they were no longer there.

Q: Another story in the book that jumped out was when the documentary filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi [Nancy Pelosi’s daughter] is standing next to a thirsty and befuddled Trump in the White House, and there’s no one around to give him a bottle of water.

So she gives him a bottle from her purse, and was stunned that there was no protocol and nobody acting as a middle person to the food and drink that goes to him. Can you talk a little bit about some of the more jarring examples of the abandonment of typical White House protocol in this administration?

Rucker: So that scene with Alexandra Pelosi and the bottle in her purse is funny and cute, but we also thought it was really representative of the general chaos and dysfunction inside the White House, especially in those early months, and the lack of preparation by the staff and by the president himself for these jobs and for the awesome responsibility that comes with it.

The fact that there wasn’t a standard staff protocol in that particular moment was illustrative of the broader trend of the administration.

Q: You wrote that a lot of people in the White House were angered by Trump’s treatment of the [US military’s] Joint Chiefs [of Staff] and of former defence secretary James Mattis.

In particular, there was one meeting in “the Tank” (a windowless vault where the Joint Chiefs meet) where former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who notably was not a military veteran but has veterans in his family and his very reverential toward them, put himself in Trump’s line of fire and defended the generals that the president was viciously insulting as “dopes and babies”.

Is there anyone in the administration who would do that now?

Rucker: It’s impossible to answer that because we can’t predict how somebody might act in a given moment. But most of the people who might’ve been inclined to stand up to the president, or to tell him no, or to confront him in a setting like that have left the administration.

We see most of the people currently serving the president at that high level as largely enablers of his. And what we mean by that is people who see their jobs as trying to execute the president’s orders and following what he wants done.

Q: A lot of Trump’s supporters would say that the title of your book, A Very Stable Genius, even though it’s a direct quote of his, is East Coast elite establishment snark. And that any implication that Trump is not a genius because of his accomplishments and his beating of the establishment would make the reporting in your book moot or biased.

What do you think is the most important reason that your book should be read by everybody, including people who would dismiss you out of hand for working at The Washington Post and writing a book like this?

Leonnig: First off, we’ve got some very nice reviews basically saying that all we do is what we intended to do, which is gather the facts, place them in this book and let people make their own minds up and make their own judgments of this administration, this president, and the people who serve him. And even [Trump’s] own enemies, those facts about them are in here as well.

We chose the title because we wanted to hold up the president’s own self-definition, one that he’s issued five times now. It’s not a mistake that he calls himself this.

We wanted to hold that mirror up to him and also stress test this definition, this moniker, with the people who know him best who had been at his shoulder for months and years serving him and are supportive of his agenda.

We’re not trying to use this book as a political tool to persuade anyone no matter what their party is. But there have been Republicans and Democrats who’ve written to us, regular people, and said that it really moved them and it altered their impression a little bit, a hardened impression that they might have had either in support of the president or not in support of the president.

There was a military father who wrote to us praising our reporting of that “Tank” meeting and expressing some concern about whether the president is really the best person to lead the country if he’s going to treat the front line of national security in this way.