Mick BROWN
In the days and weeks after his election defeat in November last year, Michael Wolff writes, Donald Trump was largely deserted by his aides and staff. “His hapless band of coconspirators were too crazy or drunk, or cynical to develop a credible strategy or execute one. It was all a s--- show – ludicrous, inexplicable, cringeworthy, nutso, even for the people who felt most loyal to him.” And so, we’re off…
This is the third book in as many years in what will come to be known as Wolff ’s “Trump Trilogy”, dissecting Donald’s erratic, mercurial period in the White House. Landslide focuses on the cataclysmic weeks after the election, and Trump’s vain attempts to overturn it. And it is the best yet. Beginning with what Wolff describes as “the most cursed and hapless [election] campaign in history”, it charts the disintegration of the Trump administration, and his increasingly desperate – not to say progressively unhinged – refusal to accept defeat. It is a terrifying, albeit highly partisan, study of a man refusing to grasp reality and retreating into delusion – or, as Trump and his supporters would doubtless have it, courageously and single-handedly fighting against the most egregious attack on American democracy.
Much of this book dwells on the delicate and precarious business of being part of Trump’s inner circle, jockeying for power and humouring his belief that the election had been stolen as the votes tally rose mercilessly against him. Nobody could read his thinking, or what he would do next: “It became logically necessary to accord him a mind of Martian status. He was simply not like anyone else.”
This fostered a mixture of fawning acquiescence and abject terror among his aides and staff, Wolff writes. As his behaviour became ever more erratic, those who over the years had learnt the delicate art of damage control – “the adults in the room” – were now edging away, their role usurped by others prepared to indulge Trump’s conviction that the election had been rigged and raise the ante into even more far-fetched conspiracy theories.
“There was a struggle,” Wolff writes, “to be the one who told him what he most wanted to hear. At the same time, while it was important to be extreme, it was equally important to be less extreme than the other extreme voices in a world quickly filling with people competing to be even more extreme.”
Foremost among them was the hapless Rudy Giuliani – “money hungry”, frequently “four sheets to the wind” – “and he passed gas, constantly”. “Rudy” was “the lead clown in the clown car” that also included the lawyer Sidney Powell, brought in by Rudy, turning up at a press conference “wearing a leopardprint cardigan and a leather jacket that made her look like something out of the Michael Jackson 1984 Victory Tour”, peddling theories about a plot involving rigged voting machines that embraced Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013), George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and the Chinese, so fantastic “that almost everyone in the White House, including the President, questioned her mental competence”.
Wolff describes a White House in paralysis over Trump’s fixation with what he called “the Steal”, accusing anyone who could not come up with
Rudy Giuliani was often ‘four sheets to the wind’ – ‘and passed gas, constantly’
the result he wanted – Fox, the Attorney General, his own lawyers, Vice President Mike Pence – of betrayal. “It was a curiously novel moment in the Trump presidency,” Wolff writes, of Pence’s refusal to overrule the Electoral votes in the Senate, “the Vice President standing up for himself.”
This is the moment of final defeat, culminating in the invasion of the Capitol by “the great unwashed”, an invasion palpably encouraged by Trump, addressing the estimated 30-60,000 people (or 250,000 according to Trump), gathered outside the building. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol – and I’ll be there with you… You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” “Oh s---,” Wolff records Trump’s close aide Jason Miller noting, watching the speech on television, while Trump’s right hand man Mark Meadows agitatedly questioned the President. “How would we do that? We can’t organise that. We can’t.” “I didn’t mean it literally,” Trump said.
The world was waiting for a new Hunter Thompson, and in Michael Wolff it has found him, with Trump providing much the same role of bête noire and object of obsession that Richard Nixon once did for the gonzo journalist. Like Thompson, Wolff writes in a hyperventilating, ampedup narrative nonfiction prose, but without Thompson’s first-person self-regard. Wolff absents himself entirely from the text, but not, it seems, from the scene. He provides a seamless, cinematic narrative of unfolding events in the White House, as if he was quietly sitting in the corner, unnoticed, taking notes, with some preternatural insight into the innermost thoughts of all the protagonists.
This, the scene in the White House on election night after learning that Fox News had called Arizona for Joe Biden: “Trump was back in his suit and tie, dark, grim, rips---, muttering, repeating to himself. ‘What the f---? How can they call this? We’re winning. And everybody can see we are going to win. Everybody’s calling to say that we’re winning. And then they call this.’ Again and again the same refrain.” It all feels true – even if, at moments, you wonder if it really is. (Wolff does not have a reputation as an altogether reliable narrator.) The author’s final coup is to have landed a personal meeting with Trump at Mar a Lago, despite two overtly hostile books (and this one, a third), and Trump threatening to sue him over the first.
The conversation was evidently characteristically rambling, discursive, self-justifying – “Nobody’s done what I’ve done” – accusatory, unrepentant – “like walking through the door”, Wolff writes, “of an entirely realised, albeit parallel universe”. It is a universe, he acknowledges, that a sizeable proportion of Americans came to inhabit, in thrall to whatever Trump may do or say. “Why did a large majority of Republicans believe, against the reasonable evidence, that there had been widespread fraud?” Wolff writes. “Because he said there was. And believe it, apparently, many still continue to do.”
Cruel, unforgiving, muckraking, scandalous. I couldn’t stop reading it.
To order a copy for £16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk