Michael Wolff – 2018
There was a time when cease-and-desist
letters and legal threats emanating from White House lawyers would cause any reputable American publisher to at least break a sweat, but not in 2018. The casual shrugging off of President Trump’s
quaking outrage over the publication of Fire
and Fury has everything to do with why the book was written in the first place;
the media circus presidency of Trump is inextricably linked with its own bad
press and it compulsively supplies all of the fuel that keeps the fires going. If the Trump team had any sense, they would
simply have ignored the book, but their near hysteria and ire over it only had
the result of catapulting it into a best-seller. All partisanship aside, the simple fact of
the matter is that Wolff could not have written this book if the current
administration was not the most leak-happy in modern U.S. history, comprised of
warring factions with no clear hierarchy.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner lead one faction,
representing New York high society and Wall Street interests. Alt-right kingmaker Steve Bannon led
another. The third and weakest was represented
by Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, the voice of traditional Republican party culture
and the McConnell-Ryan-controlled Congress.
Devoid of the ability to read, to listen, or to respect anyone smarter
than himself, the president was content to let these cliques squabble and
in-fight, all while bemoaning their many failings to his collection of
billionaire friends whom he would telephone every evening for advice and
commiseration. With no one to establish
order, the White House staffers enthusiastically leaked derogatory tidbits about
each other to the most respected newspapers they could reach, including (frequently)
the New York Times, even while publicly agreeing with Trump that journalists
were just fabricating stories out of thin air (“fake news”). The White House can thank its own lack of discipline
for allowing Michael Wolff entree into the West Wing to practically come and go
as he pleased, quoting directly from arguments he overheard and interviewing
key players in various shades of confidentiality. Most of all, it was Bannon – eager to get the
word out on “Jarvanka’s” incompetence – who provided such an abundance of
material that it warranted a book instead of what might otherwise have only
been a single Vanity Fair piece. The
book – chronicling the first nine months of Trump’s presidency, (a period
containing more surreal drama and fireworks than most eight-year terms) – is
not methodical history, and Wolff doesn’t claim to be Will Durant, and there are
just enough typos and circuitous sentence constructions for discomfort, but it
is nowhere near the cheap tabloid work that Trump defenders are claiming it
is. It is well-organized, even-keeled,
and full of background and insights that illuminate each piece of the story. Again, it must be remembered that if Wolff
wanted to sell complete fiction as history, it seems he might have crammed the
book with original salacious and inflammatory details, but instead the book is
really more of a crystallization of everything already understood and accepted
about the Trump White House, which is essentially the fact that the president
is surrounded by people who are not convinced that he has the temperament for
his job and are in a never-ending cycle of damage-control. These are the people – more than Wolff – who drove
the flow of information that resulted in Fire
and Fury.
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