Paul Mirengoff has some speculations here, but I don’t find them fully satisfactory.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/01/steve-bannon-david-stockman-and-the-need-to-spill-ones-guts-to-liberals.php

I thought of the Rolling Stone interview with General McChrystal that got him canned for being candid, and discovered a few things I didn’t know, which is that the reporter’s access was unusual and accidental, at a time when the general and staff were not “on guard” as usual with journalists.
I also learned some details about the Rolling Stone story that didn’t percolate through the internet onto the few blogs I was reading at the time.
Judging from the last graf quoted, people didn’t like finding out that the general was a Milkshake Duck (I had to look up Gorilla Channel — which also had not reached the Webz I frequent, and learned all sorts of new things….)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/24/michael-hastings-general-mcchrystal-article

“It has been widely reported that Hastings got his big story because of a fluke — the eruption of Eyjafjallajé¶kull volcano in Iceland that trapped McChrystal and his team in Paris where they were on official business.

It was there that the journalist got some of his most explosive material, including McChrystal’s anger at having to glad-hand French officialdom and an account of the four star general getting drunk on Bud Light Lime with his men.

But Hastings says being stranded by the volcano only played a part, and that the most newsworthy things happened in the first 24 hours that he was hanging round with “Team America”, as the general’s close colleagues styled themselves.

He said just being in Paris was the main advantage he had over journalists who have spent time trailing McChrystal around Afghanistan — Team America were in relaxation mode and were more indiscreet than normal.

And he argues that the special access journalists get to McChrystal in Afghanistan also leads them to not report as fully and freely as they might.

He said: “They go on these trips with McChrystal and they get to see all this cool stuff and they completely drink the Kool-Aid. They think McChrystal is awesome, these guys are fun to be with and I’m in a room talking about classified stuff.”

For many people it was a shock to read of McChrystal and his team in Paris getting “totally shitfaced”. The general has a (perhaps embellished) reputation for monk-like asceticism, eating once a day and banning alcohol from his headquarters in Kabul.”

Wasn’t her book the one that brought the whole Nancy Reagan/astrology story to the world?
* * *
Wikipedia says that Donald Regan outed her after he resigned as Chief of Staff. Nancy was indeed consulting an astrologer, but only about her husband’s safety — not, say, how to move national security information from one email account to another.

The possibility of belief should come only after assessing the credibility of the source. If the source has none then don’t even bother to read them. If the source is credible then spend the time to verify even those claims.

We used to shun known liars and refused to listen to anything they had to say. I’ve always have and still do find that to be a good policy.

I agree that it will have a short shelf life except among Trump haters. Slandering presidents is an old American custom going back to Jefferson and Madison.
The mystery to me is why Bannon destroyed his career for this. Larry Kudlow wrote that the stock market rallied on the news that Bannon had done this.

Apparently in 1959, a 13 year old Donald Trump was so upset about the size of his (allegedly) small hands that he had prosthetic hands made, after seeing one of the Tussaud wax exhibitions.

“One fateful evening, one of the Bakelite hands fell into a urinal trough at Penn Station. The bars had just closed, and hundreds of men were relieving themselves, laughing. Donald was forced to watch on, repulsed by his germophobia, as his beloved fake hand was doused in successive shafts of gold. By the time a janitor had fished the hand out, he was distraught.”

Michael Wolff is a liar and a fraud. That one passage is so obviously made up, that his only motivation is one of sheer malice and dislike of Mr. Trump. Besides, everyone knows that Bakelite had been superseded by better plastic compounds by the late 1940s.