Is it true – or too good to be true?
THE veteran journalist Michael Wolff set off a bomb yesterday in the middle of Trumpworld when details emerged from his new insidethe-White-House book, “Fire and Fury.”
In The Guardian, the world read with dropped jaw about how former chief strategist Steve Bannon used the words “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” to describe Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russians in July 2016 and said there was “zero” chance the son hadn’t brought the Russians to meet his father. This meeting is a key event in the so-called “Russian collusion” timeline the president and his supporters say was a meaningless dead end.
Then an excerpt from the book appeared on New York magazine’s Web site. The word “juicy” hardly suffices to describe this one. Trump is portrayed as a semiliterate man with no attention span, shell-shocked by his unexpected and unwanted victory, sleeping in separate rooms from his wife, insisting on changing his own sheets, fearful of being poisoned, ranting on the phone about how everybody who works for him is lousy.
And there’s more with our friend Bannon. He is seen and heard belittling Trump in private conversation with the late Roger Ailes (“he gets what he gets,” Bannon says dismissively) and portraying Trump as desperately trying to hook up with Vladimir Putin.
Yes, you’ve never read anything quite so irresistible. But be warned. Wolff is a terrific writer who has a lifelong habit of weaving in solid reporting with arrant speculation, and hard-gotten facts with feverish fancies, in a manner that makes it impossible for a reader to separate what is true from what is too good to be true.
For example, Wolff quotes Trump as saying, “Who’s that?” when Ailes suggests he choose former House Speaker John Boehner as his chief of staff. Puh-leeze. Trump spoke and tweeted repeatedly about Boehner and even golfed with the guy. Boehner was the most important Republican in Washington during the first four months of Trump’s presidential bid.
The claim is ridiculous. Wolff simply states it as fact.
In short, we’re talking about three people — Trump, Bannon and Wolff — for whom the truth is fungible.
Even if 20 percent is true, however, what times we live in. And certainly, Trump believes the Bannon quotes are accurate. Within 90 minutes of the release of the excerpt, he issued a statement declaring that Bannon had “lost his mind” after Trump fired him in August. He said Bannon had rarely been one-on-one with him and had been responsible for the loss of the Republican Senate seat from Alabama.
The rift it’s caused between the two is the important takeaway. Remember when Bannon was going to be Trump’s outside enforcer, using the Breitbart Web site to get Trumpy Republicans elected and eliminate evil establishmentarians who were improperly uncomfortable with the prospect of having their party tarnished by the Constitutiontrashing child molester Roy Moore?
That was a nice, self-aggrandizing fantasy for him while it lasted. And now? After the owners of Breitbart realize their own commercial needs are going to be stymied if their audience believes they are being led by someone Trump deems disloyal, Bannon may find himself walking through the IRT subway cars in his two shirts, asking people for donations. He looks the part already.