Scathing account is anything but boring
Five months ago, speaking off the cuff at his golf club in New Jersey, Donald Trump warned North Korea that if it continued to threaten the United States, “they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” The words, in their alliteration and biblical-sounding import, were meant to instill shock and demand respect. They certainly did the former, frightening millions into thinking that nuclear annihilation was something this man could cavalierly contemplate.
Little did the president know, however, that his simple phrase would come back to haunt him, adapted into the title of a phenomenally bestselling book that pillories the president, capturing the nation’s attention and drawing his swift and predictably incensed condemnation.
“Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” is not a book for the ages. Nor does it presume to be. Its inelegant cover — a pairing of simple red-white-and-blue letters and an unflattering photo of a snarling Trump — gives an accurate sense of what’s inside: a few hundred pages of gossipy, anecdote-heavy accounts that paint
a highly unfavorable portrait of a deeply unpopular president.
On Twitter (where else?), Trump called its author, Michael Wolff, “a total loser,” bashing his book as “really boring” — while also directing a Beverly Hills lawyer, in true Trumpian fashion, to demand that its publisher not release the book.
Putting aside that the president is reportedly inclined to think that most books are boring, his literary assessment here is off the mark: “Fire and Fury” is really not boring. In fact, it’s an enthralling read, an undeniably juicy chronicle of a presidential administration that in just one year has been beset by numerous scandals and crises.
Of course, as with any satisfying dish that has you craving more, the book, with all its accounts of petty and profanity-infused backstabbing, can ultimately leave you with the feeling of having consumed one too many of Trump’s beloved cheeseburgers.
A longtime journalist and author, Wolff describes himself as a “constant interloper” at the White House, “something quite close to an actual fly on the wall — having accepted no rules nor having made any promises about what I might or might not write.” This freedom let him amass more than 200 interviews, and his deep-background conversations lend the book its immediacy. He gives the reader a you-are-there sense of events without resorting to an unneeded dramatic writing style.
Some have questioned Wolff ’s track record and methods — deep background, as he writes, “allows for a disembodied description of events provided by an unnamed witness to them” — but it’s hard to imagine that the gist of the book can be contested. Is Trump something other than a vainglorious, incurious and insecure businessman who now has the support of members of Congress who once reviled him?
About the cheeseburgers: These late-night treats that the president allows himself, in bed, while watching three TV screens and making phone calls, are among the many details — some already excerpted and widely shared — that Wolff serves up throughout his book.
No, Trump doesn’t watch a supposed “gorilla channel” — a cartoonist’s parody excerpt was taken seriously by many online — but the president does apparently live in a way that the infamous recluse and fellow germophobe Howard Hughes might have appreciated. After moving into the White House, Wolff writes, “he imposed a set of rules: nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush.”
Beyond simple hygiene, the president felt his new living accommodations, after the glitz of Trump Tower, were underwhelming.
“Trump,” Wolff writes, “found the White House, an old building with only sporadic upkeep and piecemeal renovations — as well as a famous roach and rodent problem — to be vexing and even a little scary.”
Trump, though, wasn’t predisposed to liking the place if, in fact, he never wanted to be there.
Wolff buttresses the theory that Trump — “the worst candidate in modern history” — was confident he would lose the election and that losing would be good for business.
“Trump would be the most famous man in the world — a martyr to crooked Hillary Clinton,” Wolff writes. “His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would have transformed themselves from relatively obscure rich kids into international celebrities and brand ambassadors . ... Losing would work out for everybody.”
Having been elected — to the shock of many of those around him, including a tearful firstlady-to-be — Trump nevertheless transformed himself, Wolff posits, into “a man who believed that he deserved to be and was wholly capable of being the president of the United States.”
Not that he was necessarily prepared for the job.
When an aide, for instance, was tasked with explaining the Constitution to the presidential hopeful, the underling said, “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
When Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, urged Trump to choose “a son of a bitch as your chief of staff ” — suggesting former Speaker John Boehner — the future president’s reply was, “Who’s that?”
Wolff recounts a conversation between Trump and Rupert Murdoch — the subject of an earlier Wolff book — in which the media magnate gets off the phone and says, simply, “What a f— idiot.”
The problem, Wolff maintains, extends beyond some believing that “for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate . ... Not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen . ... The more you talked, the less he listened.”
Trump, in his defense, this weekend praised his own intelligence, writing in tweets that won’t be forgotten anytime soon, “my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” adding that he considers himself “a very stable genius.”
Wolff concludes that the essence of Trump’s personality comes down to wanting “to be loved — or at least fawned over” — and that, as his former senior adviser Steve Bannon saw it, “he hopelessly personalized everything.”
As if to prove the point, the president, who, as Wolff writes, once credited “Bannon with something like mystical powers,” is now tweeting about him (in typical Trump tabloidese) as “Sloppy Steve” after the book’s release.
One can understand why. Bannon, the brusque ideologue, is a central character in Wolff ’s telling, and he provides some of the book’s best copy, as when, feeling somewhat charitable, he calls his boss “a big warmhearted monkey,” or maligns Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and her husband, Jared Kushner, as “Jarvanka” and “the cosmopolitans.”
Much of Wolff ’s book might not come as a surprise, but he’s good at putting the dirty laundry toward a greater purpose and providing concise summations of complicated story lines, not least of which is, to quote the president, “the Russian thing.”
The final chapter on Trump remains to be seen, of course, and many other books will be written that take a broader, more historical overview of these interesting times. But one thing seems certain: The president will not invite over Michael Wolff for a tell-all follow-up.