Fire, fury... but any surprises?
This explosive book about Trump’s bizarre presidency is a bestseller, but does it hold any surprises?
‘Trump hates this book, in particular, because it portrays him as weak, indecisive and stupid’
Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House Michael Wolff L ittle, Brown €16.99
What did we talk about before we talked about Trump? On this side of the Atlantic he seems to have taken the place of the weather. Where once we tut-tutted about the rain and the sleet, we now join as one big family to gasp and groan over the latest antics of President Donald J Trump.
In this way, far from being a divisive figure as he is in America, over here he draws people together, so that everyone – young and old, rich and poor, Left and Right can join in the harmonic chorus of outrage and/ or amusement at his latest words and actions.
Accordingly, Michael Wolff’s Fire And Fury is this month’s Trump songsheet. Perversely, Trump himself has showered it with all the publicity that any book could ever want, first attempting to stop it from being published, then tweeting that the author was ‘totally discredited’ and ‘a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this boring and untruthful book!’ As a consequence, it has soared to the top of the charts, both here and in America.
Its contents are as crazy as can be, but, given the nature of the subject, they are not all that surprising. After only a year of his presidency, we have grown so used to Trump’s bonkers ways that nothing seems preposterous any more. A few weeks ago I told a friend, straight-faced, that Donald Trump had just announced he was transitioning from male to female, and that he hoped all Americans would pray for him. ‘How extraordinary!’ said my friend. ‘Any chance of another cup of tea?’
Most of the more eyebrow-lifting stories in Fire And Fury have already been well aired. Trump lies on his bed at 6.30pm scoffing a cheeseburger and watching himself on three televisions at a time. Melania sleeps in a separate room. Trump often tells the same stories over and over again and has the concentration span of a gnat. He denigrates his senior staff with foul language behind their backs. And so on. But by now even his unpredictability has become predictable. It would now be much odder to hear that the President eats lightly poached cod and is rereading Madame Bovary, or that he regularly compliments his staff on tackling complex situations with due caution, or that he is so close to Melania that he discusses the perils of climate change with her late into the night.
Nonetheless, so much information on him, crammed into 300 rollicking pages, does help one to see his full gothic monstrosity afresh. He is, to all intents and purposes, the Toddler-in-Chief, breaking into terrible tantrums over the smallest mishaps, blaming everyone for his own mistakes, and with a complete inability to link cause and effect. Followers of his tweets and speeches will already be familiar with his baby-talk, but Fire And Fury makes it plain that this is how he communicates in private, too. A frequent and characteristic demand from the Oval Office runs along these lines: ‘Big things, we need big things. This isn’t big, I need big. Bring me big. Do you even know what big is?’
If he were not famously teetotal, most people would imagine he was drunk, morning, noon and night. It’s well to be reminded of his first act as President, on Saturday January 21, 2017, which was to make a rambling speech to the CIA, of which this was a tiny portion: ‘You know when I was young. Of course I feel young – I feel like I was 30… 35… 39… Somebody said, are you young? I said, I think I’m young. I was stopping in the final months of the campaign, four stops, five stops, seven stops – speeches, speeches in front of twenty-five, thirty thousand people… fifteen, nineteen thousand, I feel young – I think we’re all so young…’ And so on.
Such public gibberish helps make Wolff’s claims about Trump’s private behaviour perfectly plausible. He is, Wolff says, ‘careless, capricious, disloyal, far beyond any sort of control’. He hates reading. ‘He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist.’ Nor does he like being told about things he doesn’t already know, such as foreign affairs, or the constitution.
He has been known to get up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. The expert who was sent to explain the American constitution to him recalls: ‘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.’ In briefings he behaves like the boy pulling faces at the back of the class. ‘He’s a guy who really hated school,’ observes an aide, ‘and he’s not going to start liking it now.’
There have already been countless antiTrump books. Most of them have portrayed him as tough, crafty and single-minded in his loose-cannon way, even if he is also mad or bad. I’d guess that Trump hates this book in particular because, unlike the others, it portrays him as weak, indecisive and stupid. He is, says Wolff, ‘with his inattention to details, a terrible negotiator’. For all his experience in business, he still can’t read a balance sheet. ‘There was simply no subject, other than perhaps building construction, that he had substantially mastered.’ Some White House insiders believe that ‘for all practical purposes’ he is ‘no more
than semi-literate’.
Even Trump’s nearest and dearest seem to go along with this view of his intellect. For Steve Mnuchin (Secretary of the Treasury) and Reince Priebus (exchief of staff) he is ‘an idiot’. H R McMaster (national security adviser) calls him a ‘dope’, Gary Cohn (chief economic adviser) ‘dumb as s**t’ and Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State) ‘a f***ing moron’. His billionaire backer Tom Barrack sums it up: Trump is ‘not only crazy, he’s stupid’. Meanwhile, his most vociferous supporter on television, Kellyanne Conway (counsellor to the President), seems to be much less supportive in private, offering what Wolff calls ‘an eye-rolling pantomime whenever Trump’s name was mentioned’ and miming putting a gun to her head after one of his more bombastic pronouncements.
Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, seems to have been Michael Wolff’s key source for anti-Trump material. This makes me wonder – if this was the chief strategist, what can the junior strategist have been like? Why did Bannon put his faith in the aptly named Wolff? He certainly hasn’t been rewarded with flattery: Wolff compares him to a character out of Elmore Leonard, ‘an antisocial, maladjusted, post-middle-aged man’, a huckster who delights in sowing hatred and discord among his White House colleagues. ‘He’s mean, dishonest and incapable of caring about other people,’ he quotes another Right-wing commentator as saying, before adding this question of his own: ‘Might he be the worst manager who ever lived?’
Wolff’s concentration on Bannon is the greatest flaw in this book. He is its main character, with even President Trump taking a subsidiary role. But Bannon was kicked out of his job last August: he is yesterday’s news. This lends the book, for all its topicality, a curiously dusty feel.
At the same time, Wolff writes almost nothing at all about Trump’s Vice President, Mike Pence. We hear that he is self-effacing, that his staff all like each other, and that ‘little leaked out of the Pence side of the White House’. In a book littered with vague, weaselly phrases such as ‘Some believed…’ and ‘Everyone thought…’, we are informed that Pence is ‘perceived as the weakest Vice President in decades’, without ever quite being told who, beyond Wolff himself, is doing the perceiving.
Clearly, throughout the months Wolff spent loitering on a sofa in a corridor of the West Wing, he barely got a glimpse of the tight-lipped Pence. But if ever Trump falls, it is Pence who will take his place. There is a fascinating passage in Robert Caro’s The Years Of President
Johnson in which LBJ can’t decide whether to accept his hated rival John F Kennedy’s offer of the vice presidency. So LBJ gets his staff to work out how many presidents over the previous hundred years had died in office. The answer was five out of 18. ‘I looked it up: one out of every four presidents has died in office,’ he said to his friend Clare Boothe Luce. ‘I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.’
Steve Bannon appears on virtually every page of Fire And Fury, while Mike Pence rates just eight mentions. Has Michael Wolff missed the main story?