Book Review: John Cassidy on Michael Wolff’s Withering Portrait of President Donald Trump
Michael Wolff, the author of the new book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, extracts from which set the
Internet ablaze on Wednesday, is an experienced magazine journalist. Among the
publications on his résumé are New York, Vanity Fair, and the Hollywood
Reporter. A chronicler of media, power, and wealth, Wolff is also willing to
dish the dirt, as he demonstrated in a gossipy tome about Rupert Murdoch, which
was published in 2008. After that book came out, there was an inquest inside
Murdoch’s News Corporation into who had granted Wolff access. Fingers were
pointed at Gary Ginsberg, a former Clinton Administration official who served
for years as Murdoch’s political adviser, confidant, and fixer. Ginsberg
subsequently lost his job, and now works at Time Warner. But, as Wolff noted in
a foreword to the paperback edition of the book, Murdoch was the person
primarily responsible for the access he gained. The press baron “not only was
(mostly) a patient and convivial interviewee but also opened every door I asked
him to open,” Wolff wrote.
Colbert Can’t Get Enough Of Michael Wolff’s New Trump Book 'Bannon may already be cooperating with Mueller': tell-all book shifts frame of Russia inquiry
If there was a similar inquest at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue about Wolff’s new book, it didn’t take long to identify a
culprit. On Wednesday afternoon, the White House press office put out a
statement in Trump’s name. “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my
Presidency,” it said. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his
mind . . . . Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the
opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false
information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was.
It is the only thing he does well.” The statement goes on,“Steve was rarely in
a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a
few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped
write phony books.” The reason for Trump’s animus was obvious.
“Fire and Fury” quotes Bannon, Trump’s former senior political adviser, as
having described the June, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump,
Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and a group of people connected to Russia as
“treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” and as saying that the meeting should have been
reported to the F.B.I. The book contains myriad other damning comments about
Trump and his family from Bannon and other Trump advisers.
There can be no doubt that Wolff relied on
Bannon heavily. The book, a copy of which I obtained from the publisher, Henry
Holt, on Wednesday, starts with the rumpled former investment banker having
dinner with Roger Ailes, the late head of Fox News, in early January, 2017, and
ends with Bannon standing outside the headquarters of Breitbart, the
conservative news organization to which he returned after being ousted from the
White House, in August. In the index, Bannon’s entry is considerably longer
than anybody else’s except Trump’s.
Bannon wasn’t Wolff’s only source, though.
The book is based on “conversations that took place over a period of eighteen
months with the president, with most members of his senior staff—some of whom
talked to me dozens of times—and with many people who they in turn spoke to,”
Wolff writes in the author’s note. His original idea, he says, was to write a
fly-on-the-wall account of Trump’s first hundred days. “The president himself
encouraged this idea. But given the many fiefdoms in the White House that came
into open conflict from the first days of the administration, there seemed no one
person able to make this happen. Equally, there was no one to say ‘Go away.’
Hence I became more a constant interloper than an invited guest.”
Wolff’s methods will doubtless attract more
scrutiny... read more:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/michael-wolffs-withering-portrait-of-president-donald-trump
