Review of "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" by Michael Wolff

Author Michael Wolff

"Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" by Michael Wolff is a tell-all about the President's first nine months in office. The book was an instant best seller, and has been reviewed and quoted extensively, so most people are probably (at least) somewhat familiar with the contents.

In a nutshell, the book is an unflattering portrait of the President and his closest advisors - who jostle for power and backstab each other at every opportunity. No one is in charge and no one seems to be running the government.....especially not the President.


President Donald Trump

I'm just going to present some of my takeaways from the book, illustrated with quotations from the narrative.

*****

Like many people I was shocked when Donald Trump won the presidency, and apparently he was too. President Trump seemingly didn't expect to win, didn't want to win, and isn't prepared for the job. Moreover, Trump isn't interested in learning the ropes, and his inner circle is equally clueless.

“It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. [Son-in-law Jared] Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing.


Jared Kushner

[Chief Strategist Steve] Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he’s smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits.”


Steve Bannon

"But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted his own expertise—no matter how paltry or irrelevant—more than anyone else’s. What’s more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you were worthy of attention."

“He had somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of performing what would be essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required. On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.”

“If the Trump White House was as unsettling as any in American history, the President’s views of foreign policy and the world at large were among its most random, uninformed, and seemingly capricious aspects. His advisers didn’t know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two. He was enamored with generals and determined that people with military command experience take the lead in foreign policy, but he hated to be told what to do. He was against nation building, but he believed there were few situations that he couldn’t personally make better. He had little to no experience in foreign policy, but he had no respect for the experts, either.”

*****

President Trump is essentially a salesman who wants people to like him, and can't understand why they don't.

“The President couldn’t stop talking. He was plaintive and self-pitying, and it was obvious to everyone that if he had a north star, it was just to be liked. He was ever uncomprehending about why everyone did not like him, or why it should be so difficult to get everyone to like him."

“For every member of the White House senior staff this would be the lasting conundrum of dealing with President Trump: the “why” of his often baffling behavior. “The president fundamentally wants to be liked” was [Senior Aide] Katie Walsh’s analysis. “He just fundamentally needs to be liked so badly that it’s always … everything is a struggle for him."

*****

President Trump's inner circle - Steve Bannon, [Chief of Staff] Reince Priebus, and Jarvanka (Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump) - had an adversarial relationship with each other, with no consensus about what Trump wanted or what direction the government should take. They consistently undermined one another and tried to ingratiate themselves with the President at the expense of their rivals.

“Bannon, Kushner, [Advisor Kellyanne] Conway, and the president’s daughter actually had no specific responsibilities—they could make it up as they went along. They did what they wanted.”


Kellyanne Conway


Ivanka Trump

“As Walsh saw it, Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House. It was a 1970s video game, the white ball pinging back and forth in the black triangle.”


Reince Priebus

“Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s prescription that “this president will sign whatever is put in front of him,” while also taking advantage of the White House’s lack of political and legislative experience and outsourcing as much policy as possible to Capitol Hill.”


Mitch McConnell

“Kushner had his personal press operation and Bannon had his. The leaking culture had become so open and overt—most of the time everybody could identify everybody else’s leaks—that it was now formally staffed.”

“Bannon invariably found some reason to study papers in the corner and then to have a last word; Priebus kept his eye on Bannon; Kushner kept constant tabs on the whereabouts of the others.”

“Here was yet another battle to be won or lost. Bannon regarded Kushner and [Economic Advisor Gary] Cohn (and Ivanka) as occupying an alternative reality that had little bearing on the real Trump revolution. Kushner and Cohn saw Bannon as not just destructive but self-destructive, and they were confident he would destroy himself before he destroyed them."


Gary Cohn

“Bannon, with mounting ferocity and pubic venom, could abide [Jarvanka] less and less every day.”

*****

The charges of colluding with Russians gained traction when the meeting led by Donald Trump, Jr. was exposed. The cover-up and subsequent firing of FBI Director Comey was inadvisable.....and asking for trouble.

"On June 9, 2016, Don Jr., Jared, and [Campaign Manager] Paul Manafort met with a movie-worthy cast of dubious characters in Trump Tower after having been promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton......It was a case.....not of masterminds and subterfuge, but of senseless and benighted people so guileless and unconcerned that they enthusiastically colluded in plain sight."


Paul Manafort


Donald Trump Jr.


Hillary Clinton

“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero,” said an astonished and derisive Bannon, not long after the meeting was revealed. “The three senior guys in the campaign,” an incredulous Bannon went on, “thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the twenty-fifth floor—with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

Offering forceful and dire warnings, Bannon told the president: “This Russian story is a third-tier story, but you fire Comey and it’ll be the biggest story in the world."

“Most of all don’t let him piss off the intel community,” said one national Republican figure to Kushner. “If you fuck with the intel community they will figure out a way to get back at you and you’ll have two or three years of a Russian investigation, and every day something else will leak out.”

"The firing of FBI director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.”


James Comey

“On May 17, twelve days after FBI director Comey was fired, without consulting the White House or the attorney general, [Deputy Attorney General Rod] Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to oversee the investigation of Trump’s, his campaign’s, and his staff’s ties to
Russia.”


Rod Rosenstein


Robert Mueller

*****

Trump couldn't bear not to come out on top and needed to be 'the brightest star' in any situation. He thought he could put one over on most anyone and seemed to believe the President could order everybody to do what he wanted - even the FBI. This was a miscalculation.

“Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He had hoped for a big blowout [with more A-list stars].”

“He was the winner and now expected to be the object of awe, fascination, and favor. He expected this to be binary: a hostile media would turn into a fannish one.”

“Trump’s extemporaneous moments were always existential, but more so for his aides than for him. He spoke obliviously and happily, believing himself to be a perfect pitch raconteur and public performer, while everyone with him held their breath. If a wackadoo moment occurred on the occasions—the frequent occasions—when his remarks careened in no clear direction, his staff had to go into intense method-acting response. It took absolute discipline not to acknowledge what everyone could see." (To me this is the most hilarious moment in the book.)

“The conundrum was that conservative media saw Trump as its creature, while Trump saw himself as a star, a vaunted and valued product of all media, one climbing ever higher. It was a cult of personality, and he was the personality. He was the most famous man in the world. ”

“Insecurity was soothed by entitlement.”

“He hopelessly personalized everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight.”

"But now there seemed to be a new understanding: Donald Trump believed he had vastly more power, authority, and control than in fact he had, and he believed his talent for manipulating people and bending and dominating them was vastly greater than it was. Pushing this line of reasoning just a little further: senior staff believed the president had a problem with reality, and reality was now overwhelming him."

“Trump quite profoundly seemed unable to distinguish between his political advantage and his personal needs—he thought emotionally, not strategically.”

“Trump was Trump—careless, capricious, disloyal, far beyond any sort of control.”

“They were all concerned that Trump did not understand what he was up against. That there was simply not enough method to his madness.”

*****

There's plenty more scuttlebutt in the book, about President Trump's antipathy to 'smart people'; his xenophobia; his relationship with his wife Melania (not great); his passion for playing golf; the pleasure he takes in putting people down and calling them names; his habit of retiring to his bedroom in the evening with a cheeseburger.....and compulsively watching his three TV screens and calling friends/advisors to get advice, rationalize his behavior, and complain about the media; Trump's falling out with Steve Bannon - who thought he should be in charge of policy and liked to call himself President Bannon; Ivanka and Jared's ambitions to be future Presidents; the rapid-fire hiring/firing/and quitting among the President's senior staff; and much much more.


Melania Trump

The book is interesting from a sensationalist point of view, but it's a bit plodding and repetitive....and many 'facts' are not unattributed to appropriate sources. Still, I'm glad I read it, and feel I now have a better understanding of President Trump's actions and behavior. 

Rating: 3.5 stars