WASHINGTON — An incendiary tell-all book by a reporter who helped bring down President Richard Nixon is roiling the White House as current and former aides of President Donald Trump are quoted as calling him an “idiot” and admitting they snatched sensitive documents off his desk to keep him from taking rash actions.

The book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward is the latest to throw the Trump administration into damage-control mode with explosive anecdotes and concerns about the commander in chief. The Post on Tuesday published details from “Fear: Trump in the White House,” the Watergate reporter’s forthcoming examination of Trump’s first 18 months in office.

Trump pushed back in an interview with the conservative Daily Caller, saying: “It’s just another bad book. He’s had a lot of credibility problems.”

The president denied that senior aides took sensitive documents from his desk, saying, “There was nobody taking anything from me.” And he stressed that he didn’t speak to Woodward.

“I never spoke to him,” Trump said. “Maybe I wasn’t given messages that he called. I probably would have spoken to him if he’d called, if he’d gotten through.”

The publication of Woodward’s book has been anticipated for weeks, and current and former White House officials estimate that nearly all their colleagues cooperated with the famed Watergate journalist. The White House, in a statement from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on Tuesday dismissed the book as “nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the President look bad.”