Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
Fire and Fury is an easy pick for most controversial book of 2018, covering the chaotic first six months of the Trump White House, from the inauguration and lies over crowd size, to the brief and terrible reign of The Mooch as communications director. Major excerpts have already been published, Michael Wolff’s adherence to journalistic norms criticized, and Donald Trump’s basic mental fitness litigated again in public. As I write this review, the scandals of the day are ‘shithole countries’, the blatant lies about his weight in his annual check-up, a looming government shutdown over DACA, and oh yeah, Russia.
So what of the book? Wolff has a very breezy, fly on the wall style, and instantly draws you in to the drama. The main character is Steve Bannon, the quote-unquote intellectual of Trumpism, a perennially disheveled strategist who brooks no compromise with liberals or the media. Against Bannon are the First Family pair of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump (Javanka), and the RNC axis of Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, and actual law-makers. The chaos is constant. I follow this stuff way too closely, and the book was bringing back scandals that I barely recalled. How innocent we were, when Michael Flynn was our biggest concern.
The picture that Wolff paints is one of a White House without any chain of command or focus, riven by intense factional rivalries, opaque staffing structures, no familiarity with government, a legislative agenda of pure fantasy, and at the center of it, the sucking void of The Donald. Trump is quoted only peripherally, usually in public statements like his speech to the CIA, but his need to be adored, his co-dependence on the despised Media, and his utter inability to understand that there is an external reality, and that people have their own identities and desires beyond how much they liked Trump.
If I have one real problem with this book, it’s that it is far too kind to Steve Bannon. I get that the guy can’t keep his mouth shut, even as other sources realized that maybe Michael Wolff wasn’t their friend, but come on! His ‘American Identity’ ideology is fascism light, he ‘won’ an election by losing the popular vote by 3 million, and his wars against the international order and domestic administrative state have drawn clear battle lines and lost potential allies. Bannon does not need to be built up, he needs to be drawn exactly as small as he is. And Trump’s racism, sexism, and general complete unfitness do not need any other blinders.
Political junkies absolutely have to read this book. It’s like catnip. Ordinary people can probably stick with the excerpts.