The Wolff at the door will change nothing
NO, it doesn’t really matter at all. I don’t believe it changes anything. The book is at times astonishing, always grimly fascinating. But despite the acres of agonised columnising about the dysfunctional White House revealed by Michael Wolff, his book Fire and Fury is ultimately an entertainment, fascinating and often comedic in its detail but adding little, if anything, to the bigger picture.
Wolff does not really tell us anything new about the character of Donald Trump.
Before his election, Trump’s critics railed against a man they saw as an intemperate, ignorant bully who boasted of sexually assaulting women, who mocked a disabled journalist, a reality TV star who spoke and tweeted in the capital letters of tabloid headlines, a man they might easily loath but had no real reason to fear. Until he defied all predictions, including his own, and got himself elected President of the United States.
But if Trump seemed to represent a grandiose, blustering, bullying element of the American character, there was also something deeply alienating about the politics of the liberal status quo as represented by Hillary Clinton and, yes, the incumbent Barack Obama. Hillary’s description of the Trump base as ‘a basket of deplorables’ during the campaign became emblematic of the Democrat disconnect with the forgotten Americans who flocked to the Trump banner.
There can be no like-forlike comparison between Obama and Trump. They are from different political planets. Obama was a professional politician, a sober man, reflective and erudite and unfailingly courteous. But the electoral loss was not just down to Hillary Clinton. It was Obama’s failure too. No amount of whingeing about the media’s harsh treatment of Hillary should protect the Democrats from a necessary and rigorous selfexamination.
But Democrats have shown no sign yet of learning the central lesson of the election: the liberal consensus they were seen to represent was seen as smug, entitled, frequently selfrighteous, removed from the reality of working class — and non-working — lives.
The party is still floundering without convincing leadership figures emerging. The same old faces pop up to denounce Trump without offering Americans an alternative that doesn’t sound like a re-heated version of Clinton’s campaign.
Where are the inspiring leaders? Where is the vision for an alternative to President Trump’s lowtax, big business heaven? Where is the aspirant leader who comes from outside the same old Capitol Hill stable of senators and congressmen and women? Perhaps the mid-terms will throw up a dynamic new figure to challenge Trump in 2020. Lack of political experience won’t matter, as the incumbent has proved.
And while I am on the mid-terms, don’t assume that the controversies around Trump, of which the book is only the latest, will automatically translate into Democrat victories. The economy is looking stronger and, as I’ve said, the Democrats haven’t offered a lot apart from an invitation to kick Trump.
The Wolff book will sell by the container load, the media ruckus will run for another few days, everybody who loathed Trump will still loath him, and those who supported him before it was published will still support him.
Short of special counsel Robert Mueller indicting the President, I doubt there is going to be a decisive turning point in the Trump story in his first term. And yes, a second term is a distinct possibility. Donald Trump will remain in office even if some of those close to him are carted off to jail. Anybody can fall — from the campaign aide Paul Manafort to his son Don Junior — but Trump will find a way of continuing.
For a man who bristles at the merest suggestion of a slight he is, nonetheless, never immobilised by criticism. Quite the contrary. It energises him. The man who was fired and turned against him, Steve Bannon, has had a kind of revenge but in the longer run it is meaningless. Trump’s strongest asset is his relentlessness. He will roll on. TO escape the Trumpian fury, I took myself off to Montparnasse on one of my irregular literary pilgrimages. I wanted to visit Samuel Beckett’s grave in Division 12, where he is buried with his wife, Suzanne, beneath an austere — sure, what else — slab of grey marble. Beckett’s neighbours include Charles Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. When I mentioned this visit on social media, a correspondent replied that Beckett’s remains should be repatriated to Ireland, along with Oscar Wilde, who is buried in that other great Parisian necropolis, Pere Lachaise. I disagree. Beckett died and was buried in the city he loved. He is where he wanted to be. As for Wilde, he found refuge in Paris in 1898, albeit a broken and melancholy one, after his release from prison in the notorious indecency case involving Lord Alfred Douglas. The French did not condemn him as a moral outcast.
I suspect the idea of returning to Dublin would have filled him with horror even if he had, by his own words, found himself ‘dying above my means’ in Paris.
Wilde died at the age of 46. I write this diary on my 57 th birthday and am studiously avoiding selfreflection. The years gone and paths taken are many. Those ahead are far fewer. A birthday that falls in the deep of winter inevitably brings closer the intimations of mortality.
From my writing window I look directly onto a bare tree. But from Beckett I will take consolation. In Krapp’s Last Tape ,he wrote,“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now...” The fire in me now. Such a line!
I know it is smouldering somewhere inside, that flame I need for the coming 12 months. On that hopeful note, let me wish you all a very Happy New Year.
Where are the inspiring leaders? Where is the vision for an alternative to President Trump’s lowtax, big business heaven?