Fire, fury and Texans
A look at those with Lone Star ties named in Wolff ’s tell-all
Everyone’s talking about Michael Wolff ’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” the book that details what Wolff claims is the pure pandemonium that went on behind closed doors during the first year of the Trump administration. Texans might want to take special note as several figures and institutions from Texas or with Lone Star ties feature within its lurid pages. Here are a few.
Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson, former chair and CEO of North Texas-based ExxonMobil:
“In early October, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s fate was sealed — if his obvious ambivalence toward the president had not already sealed it — by the revelation that he had called the president ‘a [expletive] moron.’ This — insulting Donald Trump’s intelligence — was both the thing that you could not do and the thing—- drawing there-but-for-the-grace-of-God guffaws across the senior staff — that everybody was guilty of … Tillerson would merely become yet another example of a subordinate who believed that his own abilities could somehow compensate for Trump’s failings.”
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post who lived in Houston as a child, attended River Oaks Elementary and now owns the Blue Origin suborbital launch facility near Van Horn and the Amazon Wind Farm in Scurry County:
“Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, which had become one of the many Trump media betes noires in the media world, nevertheless took pains to reach out not only to the president-elect but to his daughter Ivanka. During the campaign Trump said Amazon was getting ‘away with murder taxwise’ and that if he won, ‘Oh, do they have problems.’ Now, Trump was suddenly praising Bezos as a ‘top-level genius.’ ”
Karl Rove, strategist and political consultant for President George W. Bush:
“Not so long ago, [Steve] Bannon might have been a recognizably modern figure, something of a romantic anti-hero, an ex-military and up-from-the-working-class-guy, striving, through multiple marriages and various careers, to make it, but never finding much comfort in the establishment world, wanting to be part of it and wanting to blow it up at the same time — a character for Richard Ford, or John Updike, or Harry Crews. An American man’s story. But now such stories have crossed a political line. The American man story is a right-wing story. Bannon found his models in political infighters like Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove. All were larger-than-life American characters doing battle with conformity and modernity, relishing ways to violate liberal sensibilities.”
President Lyndon Johnson:
“Steve Bannon had pressed [Trump] to invoke Andrew Jackson as his populist model, and he had loaded up on Jackson books (they remained unread). But his real beau ideal was Lyndon Johnson. LBJ was a big man who could knock heads, do deals, and bend lesser men to his will. Trade it out so that in the end everyone got something, and the better dealmaker got a little more. (Trump did not, however, appreciate the irony of where Lyndon Johnson ended up — one of the first modern politicians to have found himself on the wrong end of both mortal and moral politics.)”
Richard Spencer, avowed racist originally from Dallas who popularized the term “altright”:
“It was Bannon who effectively gave Spencer flight by pronouncing Breitbart to be ‘the platform for the alt-right’ — the movement Spencer claimed to have founded, or at least owned the domain name for. ‘I don’t think Bannon or Trump are identitarian or alt-rightists,’ Spencer explained while camped out just over CPAC’s property line at the Gaylord. They were not, like Spencer, philosophic racists … But they are open to these ideas. And open to the people who are open to these ideas. We’re the spice in the mix.’ ”
Boy Scouts of America, based in Irving:
“And that evening, the president traveled to West Virginia to deliver a speech before the Boy Scouts of America. Once more, his speech was tonally at odds with time, place and good sense. It prompted an immediate apology from the Boy Scouts to its members, their parents and the country at large. The quick trip did not seem to improve Trump’s mood: the next morning, seething, the president again publicly attacked his attorney general and — for good measure and no evident reason — tweeted his ban of transgender people in the military.”