What is disappointing about Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, a merciless takedown of the first eight months of the Trump presidency, is that it does not end in the way it should. It leads you into thinking that President Donald Trump is now “toast”, to borrow a word from Steve Bannon, the now fired election adviser to Trump and his “chief strategist” — also apparently, the main source of the book. But, then comes the letdown: you snap the book shut at the end and realise that out there in the real world, President Trump is still in the White House, and has just referred to African nations as “****h***” countries.
The book ends with Bannon smilingly predicting: “It’s going to be wild as ****”. Even as a quote, that’s a bit tame, compared to all that is really happening, and indeed all that Bannon, quoted extensively through the book — no redactions for expletives — has to say about Trump and the characters who walked in and out of the White House in the first eight months of Trump’s presidency: Jarvanka, Bannon’s blender nickname for “dumb as a brick” Ivanka Trump and her “c**k” husband Jared Kushner; Reince Priebus, the chief of staff who wasn’t, and was replaced by Trump through a tweet; Katie Walsh, Priebus’s increasingly horrified deputy, who put in her papers within two months of Trump taking office; Sean Spicer, the Communications Director who wanted nothing more than to quit from Day One, when he had to spin the thin crowds at the Trump inaugural to “millions” and became target practice for the White House press corps; Anthony Scaramucci, who was appointed over Spicer, and who, in a drunken tweet, outed Bannon as the leaker-in-chief (and called Priebus a “drunken paranoid schizophrenic”), and not unexpectedly, was fired; Hope Hicks, whose job is to hide the bad stuff written about Trump; Kellyanne Conway, the trusted amplifier of Trump messages — to name just a few.
Much of the discussion about “explosive” revelations in the book has focused on a meeting at Trump Tower during the presidential campaign between key campaign managers including Kushner and Trump’s son Don Jr. that Bannon described as “treasonous”. Bannon also claimed that he had declined to attend the meeting. But the real revelation in the book is not a revelation at all — it is the open secret that Trump should never have been in the White House in the first place, and this is also what those closest to him believe.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “****ing moron”, Priebus called him an “idiot”, National Security Adviser HR McMaster said he was a “dope”, Gary Cohn, ex-Goldman Sachs CEO, who was roped into the White House by Jarvanka, said Trump was “dumb as ****”. In the history of the United States, there can be no other President of whom so many people in the White House thought so little. Why, even Jarvanka, whom Bannon sarcastically calls “the geniuses”, don’t think Trump has what it takes, and, according to the book, have already begun thinking of a successor to him — Nikki Haley.
The material, according to the author, is based on conversations with the President himself, with “most” members of his senior staff and others they spoke to. Right at the beginning, Wolff tells us that he was invited to be a fly on the wall in the White House by none other than Trump himself, in the belief that he would write a positive account of the first 100 days of the presidency. In the event, it is the first record, such as it is, of the first 200 or so days days, and also reaches back to the presidential campaign. The book itself is badly written — I haven’t seen em dashes used so liberally before, a parenthesis in every other sentence — and it is unclear with each nugget of information, or each juicy description right through the book, if Bannon, or Wolff’s other sources, were speaking to him, to one another in his earshot, or to third parties who then relayed it to him. Some Washingtonwallahs have pointed out errors in the book, which Wolff has said he will correct in the next edition. But all that is in the public realm about Trump makes everything in the book appear more credible than it would have been had the President been even a slightly better version of himself, instead of the manic pre-dawn tweeter threatening a nuclear strike against North Korea.
The book is as much about Bannon, former head of Breitbart — a far-right website that is known for publishing outright falsehoods — as it is about Trump. Bannon claims throughout the book, perhaps correctly, that he saved Trump from a “b**ke**ck” campaign and made him the President. He saw himself as Trump’s agenda-setter, and was shocked to see the ground cut under his feet by Jarvanka and others. The book documents the stormy lead-up tothe mercurial alt-right adviser’s exit from the White House. Bannon is now threatening to come back as President. If America had to choose between Bannon and Haley as the possible inheritors of Trumpism, let’s hope it will be Haley. But after what happened in 2016, there’s
no telling.
For Trump-lovers in India — by the sheer fact of population size, there may be more here than in the US — who hail him as the President who finally had the guts to nail Pakistan to its lies, this book should be compulsory reading. Earlier this month, I was at a public meeting in Chennai where I heard an RSS ideologue proclaim that Trump was the best thing that had happened to the world since the BJP victory in 2014. That, just as the “secular lobby”in India was trying to tarnish Prime Minister Modi’s image, the liberal lobby in the US was trying to destroy the Trump presidency, and that his continuance in the White House was essential to the well-being of the world.
Even if half of what is in this book is true, India should be treading very carefully with the US in these years of clear and present dysfunctionality inside the White House. Sure, the book reads like the plot of a B-grade TV thriller, but that is because the real life characters in it never transcend B-grade themselves. However, because the very same dramatis personae comprise the President of the United States, his daughter and son-in-law, other extended family, and a whole crew of others, all conspiring against one another, in ways that impact the rest of the world, this is an unputdownable book. Overlook the cover, which I learn from those who know about these things, is possibly the worst in the history of publishing and may not have taken even five minutes to put together.
Source: http://indianexpress.com