'Fire And Fury' - Michael Wolff (2018)

[Serge]

Thought I'd start a separate thread in here for posts about the book rather than The Donald in general.

Have just finished reading it. Pretty good, though I suspect that for most people who have been watching events unfold for the past few years - i.e. most of us - there isn't really a great deal that's surprising in here. Trump is obviously a gigantic baby who hasn't been told 'no' often enough, who manages to create new memories depending on what he believes in any given moment (and conveniently seems to delete old ones that conflict with his current opinions or views) and cannot hold a coherent line of thought for longer than about a minute.

I often got the feeling that Wolff really wanted to write a book about Bannon, who gets almost as much space as Trump in the book, and is probably a more complex and interesting (though no less despicable) character. Some of Bannon's unguarded outbursts are the highlights of the book, I think my favourite being the reveal that he calls Don Jr 'Fredo'.

Though possibly the most enjoyable thing is seeing all of these people who think they've got their rosy futures all sewn up constantly having the rug pulled from under them by events. Kellyanne Conway thinking that she's going to rake it in as a political commentator after what she views as Trump's inevitable defeat, suddenly realising that she's going to be forced into a much less rewarding and remunerative position being one example. Ivanka's delusion that she will one day be President is also a killer.

When even George W Bush says, "That's some weird shit," you know you're in for an entertaining read.

[Glebe]

SNL have just covered it in their first show of the year:

Morning Joe Michael Wolff Cold Open.

Not sidesplitting, but it least it features Bill Murray.

[Clive Langham]

The most surprising bit of information I learned from the book is that Bannon's favourite newspaper is "The Guardian."

[Serge]

Ha! Yes, that took me by surprise as well.

I've just remembered that I loved Wolff's description of Stephen Miller as 'a fifty-five year-old trapped in a thirty-two year-old's body.'

[Oops! Wrong Planet]

I've been reading the newspaper serialization, and will definitely get the book soon.
BBC presenter Justin Webb's review of it was surprisingly sympathetic to Trump.

Holy cow, as they say in Trump country.

A single vignette from Fire and Fury tells, essentially, the whole story of the Trump presidency. One aide screaming at another: "You don't know how much trouble you are in. You are as dumb as a stone. I am going to f*** you and your little group." The screamed-at aide "hysterically sobbing and visibly terrified". And a baffled president across the corridor in the Oval Office "plaintively wanting to know, 'What's going on?' ''

This first take on the 45th president's White House is a veritable explosion in a sewage works. Blinking and stinking, the participants in this shitshow have spent Trump's first year blaming each other for screwing up a presidency none of them believed would come to pass. The scale of the calamity is gargantuan, the smallness of the various characters in Michael Wolff's book mind-numbing.

But there's a further twist. As well as being more entertaining than any political book has a right to be, and more terrifying than any horror film, it is also deeply unfair and often obviously inaccurate. Yes, the perfect book for the Trump presidency. Read it with your jaw dropping by all means, but raise your eyebrows as well: Wolff is a brilliant writer with the keenest of noses for news. But he has long been accused of making stuff up.

And in this book he appears to be at it again. As Alex Shepherd of The New Republic has suggested: "Wolff's main claims . . . all track with reality. But Wolff's seeming inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, between fluffy gossip and valuable information, ultimately undercuts his work." Another journalist sniffs that the conversations reported in Fire and Fury are "suspiciously Netflix ready". The Los Angeles Times pointed out that Fire and Fury has "hydrated a handful of freeze-dried complaints about Wolff, a tireless panelist, devotee of the rich and snide opiner on media who is never not described as a 'gadfly'."

So who to believe now? Wolff, who stands by his book and says he has tapes of the key conversations? Steve Bannon, the president's former right-hand man, who is quoted accusing the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other staffers of treason, but who has now rowed back? Trump, who says Bannon has lost his mind? Another minder who says Trump cannot or will not read? Journalists who are jealous that they were scooped?

The answer of course is: none of the above. Fire and Fury is a post-truth account of a post-truth presidency. Those claiming it's all made up are the very same people who — let's be blunt — made things up for a living. And did it (the book suggests) in an effort to prop up a president they all know is incapable of doing his job.

And here is the weirdest thing of all about the Wolff book: the person who comes out best is . . . drum roll . . . Donald Trump.

I know, I know, there is nothing very attractive about this man. However, Trump comes across as genuinely rooted to the people who voted for him, in spite of the contempt he gets for his lifestyle. Wolff writes of a day in Atlantic City when Trump was trying to seduce a friend's date, a foreign model. Trump and his friend were talking about the local gamblers: "White trash," they said. The model wanted to know what that meant. "They're people like me," Trump replied, "only they're poor."

Wolff says a close Trump friend who was also a friend of Bill Clinton found the two men eerily similar — except that Clinton has a respectable front and Trump does not. When it comes to women (as Hillary Clinton must know) Clinton and Trump are two sides of a coin.

In much of the book Trump appears to be — is this why he hates it so much? — a victim as much as (or as well as) a bully. He wanted to be famous, not to be president. He is terrified of being poisoned so won't let the White House staff touch his toothbrush. He lives alone, in a bedroom dominated by three television screens. As Wolff notes: "He had lived in the same home, a vast space in Trump Tower, since shortly after the building was completed in 1983 . . . His office was a time-capsule from the 1980s, the same gold-lined mirrors, the same Time magazine covers fading on the wall. Outside the doors to his office, everywhere he looked there were the same faces, the same retainers — servants, security, courtiers, the 'yes people' — who had attended him basically always."

Now, suddenly, he was forced into the White House, which he found "to be vexing and even a little scary". So he sits there in bed eating cheeseburgers and calling friends to rail about his treatment by the liberal media. No, this is not the behaviour of a dignified well-adjusted man. But it is — genuinely — sad.

Why has Trump achieved so little? Here Wolff casts more light on the chaos of the Trump White House. "It's likely," Wolff writes about the early days of the administration, "that more people had easy access to this president than any president before." Nobody in charge. Family everywhere and in the Oval Office itself (what a great line this is) "furtive people skulked around without clear purpose".

And what have those people discovered in working for the 45th president? Wolff suggests that the fundamental hypothesis of the senior staff was that Trump could not have become president without "unique astuteness and cunning". He must know what he is doing. As Wolff puts it: "In some sense, not too closely questioned, they believed he had almost magical powers." But as time wore on? He was "often paralysed, less a savant in these instances than a figure of spluttering and dangerous insecurities". What can Kim Jong-un make of that?

Ah, but wait. The attack on Trump on grounds of bringing the world to the brink of war feels deeply unfair. Take the use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces early in the Trump presidency. Trump was faced with a dilemma. He didn't know what to do. In the end, to get him to act, his aides showed him "pictures of kids foaming at the mouth". To the disgust of his isolationist adviser Bannon, Trump ordered a missile attack on an airfield.

We are given to understand that this was idiotic. That Trump was clueless and as annoyed about having to deal with the problem as he was about the use of the weapons. Well, OK. But how does his action compare with Obama's in similar circumstances, where he threatened action if a "red line" was crossed, then, when it was, did nothing? Did Trump really mess this up any more than his predecessor?

There's a whole section in Fire and Fury about how little the president seemed to know or care about Afghanistan. Some aides said more troops should be sent and others said not. He was unable to decide. Again: this is not great. But did Obama or Bush cope any better? Did they have answers? The 43rd and 44th presidents between them arranged for all US troops to come home from Iraq and gave — to the horror of many senior soldiers — an actual date for the withdrawal. How did that work out?

Of course Trump too may make a hash of his foreign policy options. He may kill us all. But to suggest that everything was going swimmingly before the vulgarian turned up is flat untrue. Still these are small complaints about a rollicking ride of a book. There is almost nothing boring or tame. It is a great work of journalism.

And in case you think all Trump journalism will now be as entertaining and loosely sourced, the book pays tribute — unwittingly perhaps — to the cautious and mannerly traditions of American reporting that still exist in the Trump era. Buried hundreds of pages into Fire and Fury is the wonderful information that Bannon learnt that his colleague Anthony Scaramucci had accused him of "sucking his own cock" only when fact-checkers on The New Yorker rang to ask if it was true.

Attaboy, American journalists: enjoy the ride. And keep checking those facts.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2018-01-13/saturday-review/review-fire-and-fury-inside-the-trump-white-house-by-michael-wolff-bj7vwp2vx

[newbridge]

BBC presenter Justin Webb's review of it was surprisingly sympathetic to Trump.

It's because mainstream journalists are incompetent sycophants and are jealous/furious that an "outsider" (Wolff) is getting a lot of attention. The sad truth.

[Oops! Wrong Planet]

It's because mainstream journalists are incompetent sycophants and are jealous/furious that an "outsider" (Wolff) is getting a lot of attention. The sad truth.

But Webb addresses that in the review (and calls the book "a great work of journalism").

[marquis_de_sad]

BBC presenter Justin Webb's review of it was surprisingly sympathetic to Trump.

It's because mainstream journalists are incompetent sycophants and are jealous/furious that an "outsider" (Wolff) is getting a lot of attention. The sad truth.

I don't understand what you're saying here — that Webb's review highlights Trump's pitiful position because Webb is a jealous sycophant? I'm struggling to see the connection.

[newbridge]

Patronizing tone.

"Ah yes, the book suggests that by all objective evidence Trump is actually just a big dumb idiot who doesn't understand world issues, but in reality things are much more complicated! It's an entertaining read for the masses though."

[Wet Blanket]

I've only just bought it and haven't even glanced inside it yet, but I hope the contents are better than the jacket design, which is absolutely appalling. It looks like it was thrown together on Microsoft Word in about 1998.

[buttgammon]

It looks very hurried, doesn't it? I would take it as a sign the book itself was rushed out, but American book jackets generally are shit and dated-looking compared to European ones for some reason.

[Serge]

Heh, yeah, I was surprised that it was published by Little, Brown, as the back cover especially looks like something you'd see on a self-published book.

The Webb review - well the bit about feeling pity for Trump, at least - is a load of guff. It's hard to feel sorry for a man who ran for President thinking that when he lost he could use the increased celebrity he'd gain from it to increase his brand and make yet more money, who then had his bluff called when he actually won the bloody thing. There is no point in the book where I felt that Trump was 'genuinely rooted' to the people who voted for him - and if I remember correctly, the 'white trash' line relates to an anecdote from years ago, and ties in perfectly with Trumps view of himself as the underdog battling against 'the establishment' rather than feeling empathy with anybody else. It's also hard to sympathise with someone because they've had to move out of their luxury apartment to live in a mansion, to be honest. That was a good point that came up in the book - most other people who have become President and moved into the White House are slightly overawed by the fact they're suddenly living in a bloody great mansion - for Trump, it felt like downsizing.

[marquis_de_sad]

Patronizing tone.

"Ah yes, the book suggests that by all objective evidence Trump is actually just a big dumb idiot who doesn't understand world issues, but in reality things are much more complicated! It's an entertaining read for the masses though."

Did we read the same article? I thought it was evenhanded. Was it the suggestion that some of Trump's missteps weren't that different from Obama's that upset you?

[marquis_de_sad]

The Webb review - well the bit about feeling pity for Trump, at least - is a load of guff. It's hard to feel sorry for a man who ran for President thinking that when he lost he could use the increased celebrity he'd gain from it to increase his brand and make yet more money, who then had his bluff called when he actually won the bloody thing.

To be honest, whether he deserves it or not, pity is an emotion that is likely to damage him far more than anger.

[lardboy]

Michael Wolff being interviewed by Armando Iannucci?  Yes please!

https://www.waterstones.com/events/michael-wolff-in-conversation-with-armando-iannucci/london-piccadilly

[lardboy]

Audience recording of the interview:
https://mega.nz/#!7bAVECiY!YpaAMmSmku0mzP0EVzDxr-2wtd9ayEASXbzUums5CTQ

[Oops! Wrong Planet]

Audience recording of the interview:
https://mega.nz/#!7bAVECiY!YpaAMmSmku0mzP0EVzDxr-2wtd9ayEASXbzUums5CTQ

Cheers! Will listen later.

[manticore]

mistake

[Oops! Wrong Planet]

Fair enough, I won't bother.