Fire, fury and factual errors ... but it feels alarmingly accurate
There is something deliciously fitting in the fact that it is the American journalist Michael Wolff who has taken the axe to Donald Trump.
Wolff, whose trade is writing about big business and media, and whose previous most famous book was about Rupert Murdoch, is a man about whom few have a good word to say, a journalistic bruiser in designer suit and spectacles, often accused of making up things to suit his own agenda. He may remind you of someone.
The first thing to be said about Fire and Fury is that it is absolutely tremendous and impossible to put down and delivered in a punchy, abrasive style. “From the start,” Wolff writes, “the leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was, and how everybody involved in it was a loser”. What it lacks in refinement it more than makes up for in remorseless accumulation of detail.
The tone is more The Sopranos
– with a dash of Kafka – than The West Wing. Swathes of it you read peeping disbelievingly through splayed fingers, staggered at the chronicle of rank incompetence and mendacity. But even as you race through it, you stop to ask yourself – is this the unvarnished truth?
Trump’s definition of “fake news” is anything he doesn’t want to hear. Which is clearly most of the contents of this book. But you can’t help feeling that, in some respects at least, he might have a point. Critics have already begun to catalogue Wolff ’s numerous factual inaccuracies.
Certainly, his narrative new-journalism style of reported dialogue and vivid description, and his vagueness about sources, invite the suspicion that, given half the chance to make Trump look even worse than he is, he will have seized upon it. If we are to believe his account of some of the confidential conversations reproduced here, he must have been listening through a glass held to the wall of the Oval Office.
Curiously, reading Fire and Fury,i was reminded less of past political biographies than of the books written in the Eighties by the university professor turned literary assassin Albert Goldman about those two great cultural heroes, Elvis Presley and John Lennon. Written in an over-heated, hyperbolic style, they were attacked for their sensationalism, and questioned for their accuracy. But they somehow felt right, as if they had achieved a deeper – or more lowering – truth.
The same is true here. In its portrait of a president who is crude, impulsive, “no more than semi-literate”, a blank page – “or a scrambled one” – utterly devoid of intellectual curiosity, whose view of the world is distilled from what he watches on Fox News while wolfing cheeseburgers, or from whatever the person he last talked to has told him, a figure whose “instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact some clear and forceful way telling him what to do”. In all of this, you feel it is completely true to its subject. And all the more alarming for it.