BOOKS: FIRE AND FURY
When pictures emerged on January 8 of smoke pluming above Trump Tower, the US president’s Manhattan monument to glitz, you’d have been forgiven for thinking Michael Wolff was the gleeful arsonist. He had, after all, already taken a flamethrower to the Donald Trump White House. His book, Fire and Fury—available from January 5 after a threatening letter from Trump’s lawyers prompted the publishers to move up the release date— has made Trump look so stupid he took to Twitter to describe himself as a “genius... and a very stable genius at that!”
Dominating the headlines and the cable news talk shows—as numerous and noisy as the ones in India—Wolff has reason to be grateful to Trump. His intemperate response to Wolff’s admittedly provocative reporting has made Fire and Fury undoubtedly the bestselling book of 2018, and the year’s barely begun. In these pages, you lose count of the people who dismiss Trump as an idiot (or, Wolff quotes Rupert Murdoch, a moron), the lunatic who finds himself in charge of the asylum. Unlike Barack Obama, so spare, so controlled, so unblemished a product of sophisticated schooling, Trump is a figure of Rabelaisian excess—crude, greedy, slavering. To the self-serious career politicians, bureaucrats and journalists in Washington, DC, Trump was an affront. Even those closest to him, from the reptilian Stephen Bannon and other aides to his own family, can barely stomach him, think him entirely unfit for office.
Reading Fire and Fury, it’s hard not to see the contrasts between Trump and Narendra Modi. Where Trump is pathologically impulsive, loose-lipped, Modi is entirely self-abnegating, appearing to take pleasure in nothing except work. Where Trump, a political neophyte, is ideologically malleable, Modi, for all the distracting talk about development, remains committed to Hindutva. And where Trump thrives on the theatre of outrage surrounding him, on the disrespect of ‘media elites’, Modi affects indifference to his largely sycophantic press.
A book such as this could never be written about the Modi government. No journalist would enjoy the access. Wolff has done little of value with that access, choosing only to confirm existing prejudices in lurid fashion, but the access itself suggests a fundamental commitment to democracy. Would that we were so open to scrutiny.