889 Fire and Fury
I had stopped
writing about Trump. For a while now I have felt just like ...
“… a hefty chunk
of America and the world has greeted this spectacle by grabbing a bag of
popcorn, plonking down on a couch and waiting for the next instalment of the
reality show.”
Yet, the Trump
soap-opera is irresistible; I turn on the 6:30 News and it’s like: What has he
done today?
“On election night, Melania
wept with despair. ‘Now I’ll have to stay with the creepy pussy-grabber for at
least another four years’, she sobbed.”
(Hmmm, I think it's safe to say we're in the land of satire here, see The Guardian; soo funny)
Reading about
this book is interesting, to say the least (I don’t think I’ll bring myself to
actually getting it and reading it in full). But here’s The Times review in
full ...
The most significant claim in
Wolff’s book is one that well-sourced Washington reporters already know: that
every single member of Trump’s senior staff believes he is incapable of
functioning in his job. They regard him as a moron, an idiot, a spoilt,
delusional brat.
The core
reason to believe almost everything in Michael Wolff’s devastating exposé of
the Trump White House is that we knew all of it already.
We’ve watched
for an entire year as a
delusional, belligerent know-nothing has careened and plunged through
what’s left of American constitutional norms. If you came across Trump’s
Twitter feed without knowing whose it was, you’d assume it was a crazy old
geezer, slumped on a couch, remote in hand, venting at Fox News all day, the
orange powder from his constant snacking visible on his fingertips. But you’d
also be unable to ignore how vindictive, vain, bullying and cruel this
pensioner is. I’ve tried for a couple of years — I really have — to find some
redeeming characteristic in Trump, and have come up empty.
Wolff is a
dodgy player. But his sleaziness is usually with respect to ground rules:
sneakily turning off-the-record quotes into on-the-record ones, using second-hand
sources and gossip, rather than the meticulous and somewhat dry journalism of
the Washington press corps, and creating great narrative, even if the strict
chronology defies a simple story.
Yet
this White House is so dysfunctional that he didn’t even need to employ any
shenanigans. He was allowed to do what he wanted, talk to anyone (directed by
the White House itself), and the new players were so disorganised and naive he
got away with it.
And Wolff
doesn’t make stuff up from whole cloth. His main source, Steve Bannon, has not
repudiated any of the astounding quotes from the book — including the view that
the Trump campaign engaged in “treasonous” dealings with the Kremlin’s
emissaries.
The pushback
from the White House has, in turn, largely been a vague denial of everything —
rather than a clear refutation of anything in particular — along with the
insistence that Trump is, well, some kind of mad genius, whose shameless lying,
massive ignorance of policy, constantly shifting alliances, staggering
laziness and contempt for liberal democracy have nevertheless achieved
important policy goals. The “mad king” White House, in this view, is
supplemented by a “sane cabinet” White House, and therefore the damaging
charges against the president may be true, but are largely moot. This is not,
it is important to note, a refutation of Trump’s unfitness or of Wolff’s
sourcing. It is a changing of the subject.
The weakness
of the book is that it concentrates on drama, personalities and the spectacle
of a self-described “very stable genius”. It fails to note something arguably
more important: that in the month before the book’s publication, Congress
passed a tax bill that was a Republican fantasy — drastically cutting taxes on
corporations and the super-wealthy, adding a trillion dollars to the national
debt, and opening up the Alaskan Arctic to oil drilling, a goal that the
Republicans have tried and failed to achieve for the past 30 years.
Last year,
Trump allowed the most extreme elements of the GOP to add countless judges to
the federal bench, and so shift the judicial branch to the hard right for
decades. This new year has seen them expand offshore oil drilling beyond
anything Reagan dreamt of, continue the crackdown on illegal immigration
(200,000 Salvadorians are now being deported after living in the US for
decades), and wage a new war on widely popular, legal cannabis. In other words,
the Republican Party is finding a way to cordon off Trump as far as is possible
from actually running the country, but is using him as a base-pleaser and an
antagonist to everyone they hate.
And the core
truth of the book remains: the American republic is now well into its decadent
Roman phase, where unqualified celebrities and reality-show stars become
figureheads of the idiocracy (Oprah is the Democratic alternative), and where
brutal polarisation means that each party, if dominant, focuses on undoing
every single thing done by its rival. For this moment in American decline,
Trump is the perfect president: driven by hatred of the other tribe, and by
incoherent prejudices and conspiracy theories.
And this is
the story of the moment. Trump’s goal is to normalise this insanity, and Wolff
simply refuses to play along. (It’s worth noting that it’s hard to dismiss
Wolff as a typical left-liberal journalist. He has made a career of baiting
liberal media types, is largely shunned by them, and began last year as an
anti-anti-Trump polemicist.) It is not normal for a president to read nothing,
and to spend hours a day tweeting at live cable news. It is not normal for a
president to assail his own intelligence services, to threaten and belittle
private citizens.
The most
significant claim in Wolff’s book is one that well-sourced Washington reporters
already know: that every single member of Trump’s senior staff believes he is
incapable of functioning in his job. They regard him as a moron, an idiot, a
spoilt, delusional brat: “Bannon described Trump as a simple machine,” writes
Wolff. “The On switch was full of flattery, the Off switch full of calumny. The
flattery was dripping, slavish, cast in ultimate superlatives, and entirely
disconnected from reality: so-and-so was the best, the most incredible, the ne
plus ultra, the eternal. The calumny was angry, bitter, resentful, ever a
casting out and closing of the iron door.” You never knew which of these crude
binaries would show up each day.
And that’s why
very little in this book shocks. Every single senior Trump staffer has been
leaking like a colander from the moment this farce began. As Wolff notes, this
White House has achieved “landmark transparency”. And so we should be in no way
surprised that Bannon, only recently lauded as a great friend, is now in
Siberia. An unstable, disloyal, mercurial and vindictive boss will tend to
attract unstable, disloyal, mercurial and vindictive staffers.
Despite all
this, a hefty chunk of America and the world has greeted this spectacle by
grabbing a bag of popcorn, plonking down on a couch and waiting for the next
instalment of the reality show. Some of this rather staggering complacency is
due to a near golden age in some respect: Trump arrived on the scene as a whole
bunch of indicators turned upward. Eight years of growth in America have
brought unemployment to a seven-year low, the Dow to 25,000, and median
household income to a record high. Crime rates continue to plunge. More
Americans now have health insurance than ever before. Isis has been destroyed
in its heartland. Thanks to Obama, the US is no longer bogged down in occupying
ungovernable failed states. Everything on the surface looks fine. The more
drastic changes that Trump proposed — a trade war with China, an end to Nafta —
have all disappeared down the plughole of what passes for his attention span.
There’s a growing sense that perhaps we can ride this out, that we can get
through the next three years without nuclear catastrophe, a constitutional
crisis, civil unrest or an economic downswing.
And maybe we
can. Maybe the drunk driver, squinting through the car window, skirting the
kerb, swerving sharply around potholes on black ice, can avoid killing someone
or trashing the car on the rest of his journey home. But the question that now
hangs in front of America, and most specifically the Republican Party, is
whether this risk can really be afforded, whether the stability of the world is
worth a tax cut or some oil drilling, or whether it is the responsibility of
those in Congress to acknowledge the emergency that is upon us.
We’ve known
all about this shambles for a long time now. The real merit of Wolff’s book is
that it brings it all together in one riveting narrative, with the truth coming
directly sourced from the president’s own mortified advisers. The emperor’s
clothes were falling down, but now they have vanished. And so we enter this new
year suspended in surrealism: an emergency that still isn’t an emergency, a
crisis that is not a crisis, while the opportunists make their moves, the
irrational emperor steams forward, and we all wonder if reality will ever
actually intrude on this farcical reality show.