Unfit president didn't want job
GOSSIPY political books such as Michael Wolff ’s Fire and are typically assailed for centring on palace machinations at the expense of policy substance, for privileging White House turf battles over meaningful debates about national challenges. In keeping with that tradition, the pages of Wolff ’s book are littered with insults and intrigue, backstabbing and dysfunction.
In this case, however, such focus seems sadly appropriate. If there is one thing we’ve learned during the first year of the Trump presidency – something that Fire
and Fury affirms – it is that in this White House, the intrigue is the thing; substance is almost incidental, while policy is often just a weapon wielded in the service of careerism, vanity, personal advantage and brand management.
The president himself appears driven by insecurity, ego and a constant fear of ridicule and failure more than by any ideological conviction. “He hopelessly personalised everything,” Wolff writes of Trump’s first nine months in the Oval Office. “He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always trying to one-up you.”
The central players in Wolff ’s account are former White House strategist Stephen K Bannon, former chief of staff Reince Priebus and somehow-still-hanging-on senior adviser Jared Kushner. “Bannon was the alt-right militant. Kushner was the New York Democrat. And Priebus was the establishment Republican,” Wolff writes, and these contrasting viewpoints clashed in Trump’s frenetic, distracted, uninterested mind. “It was quite clear that deciding between contradictory policy approaches was not his style of leadership,” Wolff writes of the president. “He simply hoped that difficult decisions would make themselves.”
Trump’s disdain for policy details was evident in some of the most crucial initiatives of his young presidency. When House Speaker Paul Ryan and Representative Tom Price (who would become Trump’s first secretary of health) came to discuss the effort to repeal Obamacare, the president-elect kept “trying to turn the conversation to golf ”, Wolff reports. “The details of the contested legislation were, to him, particularly boring.”
When Trump had to decide how to respond to the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons in April, his initial reaction was telling. “To both Kushner and (national security adviser HR) McMaster,” Wolff writes, “it seemed obvious that the president was more annoyed about having to think about the attack than by the attack itself.”
A particularly brutal moment, Wolff reports, came in March, when Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh confronted Kushner about Trump’s objectives. “What are the three priorities of this White House?” Kushner’s response: “Yes, we should probably have that conversation.” Yeah, probably. Instead, the president has been preoccupied with his often negative portrayals in the news media, a nearly lifelong obsession. He does not view criticism as a response to his positions and statements, but as a personal attack. Trump complained that journalists’ attacks against him were without precedent. “He had reviewed the treatment of all other presidents in the media and there was nothing like this ever, even of Nixon who was treated very unfairly.”
Wolff ’s prose is lively and entertaining and Fire and Fury is at times a riveting read, but the author has something of a mixed reputation as a faithful chronicler of reality. As media reporter Paul Farhi points out, Wolff “has been accused of not just re-creating scenes in his books and columns, but of creating them wholesale”.
The White House, in the most predictable response ever, has threatened libel charges and called on the publishers to cease and desist from disseminating the book. (The publisher’s response was to move up the release date.)
But the most damning thing this book reveals is the extent to which the Trump team, and the president himself, were simply unprepared to govern. They did not expect to win the election, so they didn’t bother to get ready.