Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff
Rating: ★★★☆☆
The first nine months of Donald Trump’s term were stormy, outrageous—and absolutely mesmerizing. Now, thanks to his deep access to the West Wing, bestselling author Michael Wolff tells the riveting story of how Trump launched a tenure as volatile and fiery as the man himself.
In this explosive book, Wolff provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office. Among the revelations:
— What President Trump’s staff really thinks of him
— What inspired Trump to claim he was wire-tapped by President Obama
— Why FBI director James Comey was really fired
— Why chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner couldn’t be in the same room
— Who is really directing the Trump administration’s strategy in the wake of Bannon’s firing
— What the secret to communicating with Trump is
— What the Trump administration has in common with the movie The ProducersNever before has a presidency so divided the American people. Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.
This book is a pretty good answer to that universal “What the fuck just happened???” question we all asked ourselves in the weeks and months after Trump won the election.
That’s because it recounts a LOT of what we already know, with far less deeper insight than I was hoping for.
The other thing that makes me a little wary of this is the way it is written. I’m sorry, but this doesn’t really feel like journalism to me. It reads like fiction. Like Wolff was somehow a fly on the wall for every important everything that happened on Capitol Hill in 2017.
There is a lot of:
“Ivanka walked down the stairs, her phone pressed to her ear, and said, “I know, it’s a complete mess. I’m working on it.””
How does the author know this detail? Did he witness it? Did a White House aide tell him she said that? Did he hear it third or fourth hand from someone who knows someone who knows someone who was there?
It isn’t clear, because he doesn’t cite any sources aside from in his intro, which are pretty vague.
Are there some explosive details in here? Sure, yes, peppered in between exhaustively long chapters focused on that necromancer’s wet dream, Steve Bannon, and the other sycophants and reprobates Trump surrounds himself with.
I honestly suggest reading a super spoilery review with the best of the incendiary passages instead of subjecting yourself to a lengthy recounting of what was the worst year of American news and politics and policy in recent history.
I would have much rather this been a factual, cited, re-telling. Not a fictionalized version – even if it’s accurate and truthful, how can I take it seriously without knowing where the accounts come from?
Or rather, not “take it seriously” but take it as anything other than what I already know and suspect based on that last hellish year that I’ve lived and witnessed.