Letter from America
Michael Wolff portrays Donald Trump as greedy, cruel and canny
Is Donald Trump senile or just crazy? Is he Caligula-mad, ready to appoint a horse to political office, or just run-of-themill imperial, vicious and depraved? Is he a political genius, or, to quote his own Secretary of State, a ‘f***ing moron’?
These are just some of the questions which emerge from Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s rollicking account of the Trump presidency.
Wolff made his name writing about media, but befriended this administration early, while it had its mind on other things. He hung around the West Wing of the White House, tuning into conversations and offering a sympathetic ear to the President’s flailing, desperate staff, notably Steve Bannon, the President’s former campaign manager and chief strategist.
To the envy of every journalist in Washington, he slipped in through the side door of history and, with one book, has made off with the goods. It is infinitely more fun than the usual Washington journalistic snoozers about hacks slugging each other to slow deaths with rumour and briefing papers.
Wolff writes with the omniscience of a Roman annalist building his narrative and packing it with personal detail and observations on politics and power. For sheer colour, it is as if Robert Graves had plopped himself down on the Emperor Claudius’s couch.
He opens with a line on his method: ‘Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.’
His book is a grappling attempt at synthesis and the differing accounts often clatter to the floor. Fine by me. It is a first draft of history, and a gripping one.
Wolff’s Trump is a demented wreck, though still glimmering with the feral instincts which have governed his life. The untrammelled libido. The greed. The simultaneous need for flattery, and suspicion of those who offer it. He is impossible to manage or contain.
The rest of the characters are ribald and profane. They call the President variously a ‘f***ing idiot’ who ‘sucks up and shits down’. They call each other ‘dumb as shit’, a ‘dope’ or a ‘strange little f***er’. At one point, Steve Bannon is contacted by the fact-checkers at The New Yorker about an allegation made by the White House director of communications, that he ‘sucked his own c**k’. In Wolff’s telling, these guys don’t dither and bargain, they ‘fumpher’ and ‘hondle’. It’s less government than Goodfellas. Great journalism often depends on great betrayals and Wolff is heartless. He spent months with these people, befriending them, sympathising, directing the traffic of gossip. Yet he clearly despises them all.
They saw in Trump their once-in-alifetime chance to vault right up to the highest levels of power. They weren’t the fabled ‘best and the brightest’ from business and academia, the men and women who come to Washington with each administration.
Trump’s team were the out-of-town carnival acts, the dwarf-tossers and armpit musicians of right-wing cable TV, thrust onto the main stage and expected to play Hamlet.
That included his own family. Melania, Trump’s third wife, bursts into tears the night her husband wins the Presidency. She never expected it or wanted it. His two sons, Don Jr and Eric, are known to his campaign team as Uday and Qusay, after Saddam Hussein’s two useless, spoiled sons. When Bannon screams at Trump’s dimwit daughter, Ivanka, in front of her father, ‘You are a f***ing liar’, Trump won’t defend her. All he says is ‘I told you this is a tough town, baby.’
Most coverage of Wolff’s book focused on the ugly stories about Trump. His boasts about seducing his friends’ wives. His ignorance of even the most basic concepts of government. His personal indiscipline. The abject chaos of his administration.
We learn that he likes to spend his evenings in bed watching television and eating cheeseburgers. Each to his own. The Obamas had James Taylor come and perform for them, arguably a more serious breach of good taste.
But where Wolff surprises is in his appreciation. His Trump is imperial, grandiose, autocratic, mercurial, peculiar and as cruel to his own family as he is to those he hires. But he won the Presidency. He saw what Hillary Clinton didn’t, that you can’t keep loading up poor whites with feelings of cultural irrelevance, deprive them of work, and not expect them to howl at the ballot box.
His political genius, Wolff writes, derives from ‘his enthusiasm, quickness, spontaneity, and – if he departed for a moment from the nonstop focus on himself – an often incisive sense of the weakness of his opponents and a sense of their deepest desires.’
There is so much hostility to Trump that it is easy to forget the political miracle of his election. Not even Trump imagined he would be President, until he was.
And now for all the stumblebums around him, he has overseen the most significant tax reforms since Ronald Reagan. Occasionally, things go very right for Donald Trump, and it is news when anyone bothers to explain why.