Intrigue over substance in White House

A riveting read, but author picked version of events he ‘believes.’

Dishy political books such as Michael Wolff ’s “Fire and Fury” are typically assailed for centering 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 personalized 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, someone else was always trying to take the limelight.”

The central players in Wolff ’s account are former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, former chief of staff Reince Priebus and somehow-still-hangingon 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 decisions and initiatives of his young presidency. During the transition period, when House Speaker Paul Ryan and Rep. Tom Price (who would become Trump’s first secretary of health and human services) came to discuss the effort to repeal and replace 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; his attention would begin wandering from the first words of a policy discussion. He would have been able to enumerate few of the particulars of Obamacare.” In one meeting, he blurted out conservative heresy — “Why can’t Medicare simply cover everybody?” — less out of any policy conviction than in an effort to just move on.

A particularly brutal moment, Wolff reports, came in March, when Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh confronted Kushner about Trump’s objectives. “Just give me the three things the president wants to focus on,” she pleaded. “What are the three priorities of this White House?” Kushner’s response: “Yes, we should probably have that conversation.”

Yeah, probably.

Establishing policy priorities has not been, well, a priority for this White House. 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.” It’s vintage Trump: He must claim he’s the best at being treated the worst.

Wolff ’s prose is lively and entertaining — “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 Washington Post 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.” In a prefatory author’s note to this latest book, Wolff writes that the work is based on more than 200 interviews with campaign and White House staffers over the past 18 months, and he claims that shortly after Trump’s inauguration, he “took up something like a semipermanent seat on a couch in the West Wing.” He says he sometimes offers conflicting accounts of particular events so readers can make their own judgments, and in other instances he has “settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”

“Believe” is not a terribly comforting word. “Know” or “confirm” is better.

The White House, in the most predictable response ever, has threatened libel charges and called on Henry Holt and Co. to cease and desist from disseminating the book. (The publisher’s response was to move up the release date from Tuesday to the past Friday.) Trump’s ire has been trained most forcefully on Bannon, who looms as the book’s spirit animal and most crucial and recurring source. “Fire and Fury” almost has a “by Steve Bannon as told to Michael Wolff ” vibe to it.

But more than the insults and trolling 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. Despite promising voters that he would start winning so much that they’d get tired of it, Trump apparently made a different pledge to Melania, who feared the disruption of her easy, sheltered existence. “He offered his wife a solemn guarantee: there was simply no way he would win.”

With the presidency suddenly in hand, they didn’t have a plan, they didn’t have a purpose, and they barely had a team. “Nobody had a political background,” Wolff writes of the transition staff. “Nobody had a policy background. Nobody had a legislative background.” Least of all the increasingly angry and erratic new president.

The president’s mental capacity has become a subject of public debate, and in this book Wolff suggests Trump’s faculties are deteriorating. He describes the president as “semiliterate,” unable to conduct a meaningful one-on-one exchange with another person and prone to awkward repetitions in speech. Wolff is not a mental health professional, and his concerns seem to mix temperamental and cognitive fitness. But if it is true, as he reports, that people close to Trump are seriously questioning whether the president has “the wherewithal to adequately function in his job,” that becomes a matter of national concern, especially when the self-proclaimed “very stable genius” in the White House is bragging about his big, powerful nuclear button.

Yes, we should probably have that conversation.