Monday, January 15, 2018

The TL:DR Guide to Michael Wolff's 'Fire and Fury'

A quick note about Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, which upon a second pass still has, to put it mildly, some serious issues: As any art historian can pick out a forgery, veteran journalists reading this book will quickly spot an oversold narrative and perhaps unprecedented sourcing issues.

The tortured "Author's Note" preceding the prologue almost reads like a novel in itself. In fact, trying to follow Wolff's idea of what "off the record" means or does not mean is like trying to follow the hands of a three-card monte dealer. It just can't be done.

As a White House source put it, Wolff's narrative personality is almost like a comedy act in itself:

"He's like the old Jon Lovitz character from Saturday Night Live," the source said. "You know – 'Yeah, I went to Harvard, that's the ticket. And, yeah, I was on the couch in the West Wing for months, that's the ticket.'"

Fire and Fury is really two books rolled into one. The first is a compelling nonfiction book about the intellectual divide in the modern right, as candidly hashed out to Wolff by influential figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes and (seemingly?) Rupert Murdoch.

The second is a Primary Colors-style novel about what goes on behind various closed doors in the Trump White House, based on a few bits and pieces of fact, which are offset by mountains of eye-rollingly insupportable supposition, spiced with occasional stretches of believable analysis.

There is considerable debate in the media world, on both the left and the right, about the value of this book (even I've gone back and forth on it). In the end, I think it's like a piece of moldy rye bread – you have to cut around the hairily sourced parts to keep from getting poisoned. But on a broad level, there is something to dig into.

Reading the book, there are at least a few real points about Trump that shine through:

1) Trump has almost no ideological convictions and is motivated almost entirely by the classic narcissistic value equation, i.e. how much praise or scorn he gets on a second-to-second basis, from whom, and why. Had he not run as a Republican – and in particular won on a platform scripted by a nationalist true believer like Bannon – he might very well by now have been pushed into a completely different kind of presidency. Trump wants so badly to be liked that, especially with the influence of Kushner and Ivanka, he might easily have allowed his White House to drift back toward his original politics, which (as New Yorkers and furious conservatives alike will clearly remember) was once squarely in the Bob Rubin rich-guy sort-of Democrat mold.

2) However, as Bannon points out in the book – correctly – Trump by now is so firmly entrenched in the consciousness of America's intellectual elite as a villain that he will never be accepted by that crowd. The constant battering Trump gets from the press, especially, ensures that he will continue to lash out at them, forcing him continually to tack back to the only people who still like him – Bannon's angry-man followers. This despite the fact that what Trump clearly craves is, instead, the approval of members of his own class.

3) The result is an insane paradox of an America led by a doomed and trapped psyche. This is a president who in another era might have been confined to the impact of an ordinary bad commander-in-chief (we've had many), i.e., sedated and/or scripted in public, and kept on the golf course the rest of the time while the empire runs on the dreary autopilot of donors, P.R. flacks and military advisers.

Instead, we get a leader whose most dangerous moments come during his ever-expanding calendar of hyper-tweeting downtime (incidentally, is anything more certain than the term "executive time" replacing "taking my talents to South beach" as this generation's euphemism for masturbation?). All those crazed Trump tweets guarantee an endless cycle of paranoia and rebuke – and a permanently paralyzed White House.

Anyway, it's a fascinating book. But too long for most people in the Internet age to actually read. So without further ado, here's shorter Michael Wolff, in chapter form:

a) The Author's Note:

See if you can make sense of this passage:

"Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book. Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true."

In other words: The unattributed facts you're about to read are sometimes my best guess as to the truth, and sometimes someone else's more dubious version, and you won't know which is which, but – whatever, enjoy!

b) Prologue: Ailes and Bannon

This is the most interesting part of the book, and not just because Wolff has the stones to use the word "louche" in a sentence early on (there's an "I went to college, honest" word choice about once every four pages in Fire and Fury). This passage alone sums up 30 years of the history of right-wing thinking:

"Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone. The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox's angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world. The joke was on somebody – and Ailes thought it might be on him."

This is the main theme of the book: That both the Republican establishment (as represented by the likes of Ailes and Murdoch) and the alt-right revolution (as represented by Bannon) think Trump is a fumbled football they can pick up and run into the end zone of power.

In the end, of course, the joke is on everyone, as Trump's brain fumbles hopelessly out of bounds and neither side successfully appropriates his presidency, which becomes an endlessly circular, purposeless, narcissistic tweet-storm.

1. ELECTION DAY


Wolff becomes roughly the 40,000th writer to compare Trump's campaign to The Producers. In classic Hollywood formula-script fashion, the Trump campaign is presented as composed of characters that each have their own desperate motivation to lose, only to each be crushed in their own way by the shocker result.

This chapter reads a lot like Shattered, the acid catalogue of finger-pointing that took place among high-ranking Clinton campaign figures after Hillary's loss, except here it's backwards. In this case, the characters start to blame each other for somehow transforming what Steve Bannon called a surefire "broke dick" loser campaign into a winner.

The only person who truly believed from the start that Trump would win is Melania, who had learned to expect, with religious certainty, that her husband would deliver upon the worst-case scenario in every situation. She was right.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:
Image: Carolyn Kaster/AP