Fire and Fury

January 15, 2018
Wolff (Television is the New Television) presents an insider's look at the extreme dysfunction of the Trump administration in this searing real-life page-turner, based on hundreds of conversations conducted over 18 months, including with most of Trump's senior staff. He starts by showing how the seeds for chaotic governance were sown in the election campaign, which almost no one close to Trump thought would succeed. (His wife, Melania, was one of the few exceptions.) Wolff then walks the reader through the tumult of the first eight months of Trump's presidency, including the rambling speech to CIA staffers in which the president said that the U.S. should have "kept" Iraq's oil; the casual approach to enacting a travel ban on immigrants from majority-Muslim countries; the firings of Michael Flynn and James Comey; and the exodus of key officials, including advisor Steve Bannon. Wolff peppers his narrative with devastating assessments of the president from those with close access to him: Former White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh stated that trying to understand Trump was "like trying to figure out what a child wants." And longtime Trump political aide Sam Nunberg remarked, "Is Trump a good person, an intelligent person, a capable person? I don't even know." While Wolff's use of anonymous "deep background" sources may give readers reservations about the accuracy of every detail, this explosive account will undoubtedly remain a topic of conversation for the near future. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

Headline-grabbing fly-on-the-wall view of the dysfunctional playroom that is the Trump White House."What is this 'white trash'?" asks a fashion model of Donald Trump. He replies, "They're people just like me, only they're poor." There's a certain Snopes-comes-to-the-big-city feel to celebrity journalist Wolff's (Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age, 2015, etc.) tawdry portrait of the current occupants of the White House, which, writes the author, is based on conversations with the president and his senior staff and backed by hundreds of hours of recordings. Given the many competing fiefdoms in the West Wing, Wolff adds, no one wholly endorsed his access ("the president himself encouraged this idea," he says), but no one quite said no, either. The results are damning, those competing fiefdoms not just jealous of their turf, but also vicious in their characterizations of the other side. Most aggressively nasty, by the author's account, is former assistant Steve Bannon, who describes Trump as "a simple machine" with a binary of flattery and calumny, while he declares that "I am the leader of the national-populist movement" and suggests that Trumpism can do fine without its namesake--who, he adds, will not be around for a second term. Wolff has plenty of sting himself. Of one-time intern-turned-power broker Stephen Miller, he sneers, "he was supposed to be the house intellectual but was militantly unread," while he suggests that the dumb-as-a-brick (Bannon's characterization) Ivanka's relationship with her father is purely transactional: "It was business. Building the brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House--it was all business." No one in the administration seems up to the job he or she is supposed to be doing, and there's an ugly, startling instance of incompetence on every page.The White House has naturally denied and decried Wolff's account, but even if it's only halfway accurate, it presents an appalling view of a frighteningly unqualified and unprepared gang that can't think straight.

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