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Trump seems to have gotten a debate question... in advance! Or at least the nature of a debate question.

Ms. Kelly writes that her problems started in August, the Monday before the first Republican presidential primary debate. She had just done a segment on her show, “The Kelly File,” that infuriated Mr. Trump. He refused to make his own scheduled appearance on her show unless she phoned him personally.

“I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account against you,” she says he told her, “and I still may.”

Then, the day before the first presidential debate, Mr. Trump was in a lather again, Ms. Kelly writes. He called Fox executives, saying he’d heard that her first question “was a very pointed question directed at him.” This disconcerted her, because it was true: It was about his history of using disparaging language about women.

She doesn’t speculate where the leak came from. (She reports. You decide.) But that’s another unambiguous takeaway from this book: Parts of Fox — or at the very least, Roger Ailes, the network’s chairman until July, when he was given the boot after several allegations of sexual harassment were made against him — seemed to be nakedly colluding with the Republican presidential nominee.

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As we all know, Mr. Trump did unleash his beautiful Twitter account on Ms. Kelly after that debate, and it threatened to upend her life. He called her “overrated,” “angry,” “crazy” and “a bimbo”; he went on CNN with Don Lemon opposite her show’s time slot and said there was blood coming out of Ms. Kelly’s eyes, “blood coming out of her … whatever.” (My favorite response to this: Katie Couric wrote Ms. Kelly a note asking: “Are you okay? Do you need some Tampax?”)

The hectoring went on for weeks. “Every time Trump acted up,” Ms. Kelly writes, “it was like he flipped a switch, instantly causing a flood of intense nastiness.” Kelly’s voice mail box filled with invective and obscenities. People phoned in with death threats. Ms. Kelly’s young daughter asked her what a bimbo was; a suspicious man showed up in the lobby of her apartment building; her family took an armed guard to Disney World.

It didn’t help that Mr. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen retweeted this message from a Trump supporter: “#boycottmegynkelly @realDonaldTrump we can gut her.”

Part of Mr. Trump’s response seemed like that of a man betrayed: Months before announcing his candidacy, he had tried hard to curry Ms. Kelly’s favor. He sent her notes, including an attagirl scrawled across her picture in The New York Times Magazine . (When Vanity Fair reported this, Mr. Trump denied it; Ms. Kelly includes proof, a picture.) Ms. Kelly and her husband declined an invitation to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s fabled estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Then Mr. Trump tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to persuade her to let him pick up the tab for the weekend she spent with two girlfriends at the Trump SoHo hotel.

“This is actually one of the untold stories of the 2016 campaign,” Ms. Kelly writes. “I was not the only journalist to whom Trump offered gifts clearly meant to shape coverage. Many reporters have told me that Trump worked hard to offer them something fabulous — from hotel rooms to rides on his 757.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/bo...-for-more.html