Michael Wolff`s Book on the Trump White House

• Michael Sakbani
• Michael Sakbani

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MONDAY, JANUARY 22, 2018

Michael Wolff`s Book on the Trump White House

 Michael Wolff’s ‘Book on Trump and his White House.

                                       By

                       Dr. Michael Sakbani

Michael Wolf `s bombshell of a book, Fire and Fury, is already a best seller. More than two million copies have already been sold The book was criticized by reasonable people for its lack of documentation, for its narrative style of telling what was said as if the author was in the meetings he recounts and for some factual errors here and there. Trump supporters, however,  like Steve Miller, called it  a garbage book by garbage author.

In fact, my impression is that the book is well-written in a journalistic style, certainly lacking in documentation but vivid with details about the chaotic White House and the well etched personalities, in particular, Steve Bannon and the President himself. To be sure it is not a history; the records are still not revealed, but it is in the genre of historical fictions where the characters and events are real but their dialogue is partially made up.

For those following the US bizarre scene, there are no revelations; we all knew the events and the characters. But we did not live with them and experience their daily hustle and bustle. And that is  what Wolff provides to our prisms.

There is, for this economist, no discussion of the Trump programs in the economic, international and domestic arenas. However, that is not evidently what the author wanted to write about.

For the past two week, all of Washington—and, indeed, much of the country, judging by the book sales—had been reading, digesting, and debating Wolff`s book, the ethics and accuracy of Wolff’s journalism, and the horrifying details about the naked-emperor-in-the-Oval Office of-President that he exposes. The book’s scathing portrait of an incompetent, incoherent, “semi-literate” wild man in the White House is largely arresting.

The president is revealed in magnified details: his transnational style, his little informed approach to issues, his unwillingness to read or take advice, his lack of personal discipline and self -control, his insatiable desire to be liked and approved and his tantrums about his perception of the unfairness of his critics.  He certainly is shrewd and street smart but totally incapable of pivoting from the candidate Trump to President Trump and in essence a poor strategist but a capable tactician. A central trait appears to be his emotional bursts expressed by his compulsive tweets, which complicates everything and demeans his office.

His schedule starts early in the morning with his tweets. He usually eats breakfast in his bed room and stay in his living quarters till about 11 O`clock watching three TV screens. About 11 he goes to his office for state matters. After dinner, he starts his phone calling to his friends everywhere, especially, in NYC, while he is watching TV again. These phone calls were the biggest source of leaks from the White House. The rest of the leaks are from the various contending groups in the WH.

Steve Bannon is presented with all his wit, his warts, his right wing hubris and nationalist irrelevance for this age. He is smart, politically cunning but like the President, he is a poor strategist. In his last days in the WH he wanted to continue Trumpism without Trump, a sort of right wing nationalist appeal to Trump supporters. He was hoping to oust the traditional Republican establishment by running right wing candidates in primaries against their candidates. He does not seem to have the continued support from rich Zionists and other right-wing contributors to do that out of Breitpart . It took only a couple of weeks for him to lose his platform.

 The scene around all the characters is rich with the supper rich who control politics and have their own agendas. We are treated to the parade of the Mercers, father and daughter, to Rupert Murduch, the Zionist Addelson with his Israel obsessions, Sam Schwartz, the Koch brothers and other lesser players. We also get a glimpse of the Republican establishment characters, especially the light weight Speaker Paul Rayan and the in house cheer leader Mike Pence, the least impressive Vice President of mod ern times and the hapless Reince Briebas and his nemeses Scaramoushi ((Scaramucci)), the short stop  character pulled out of the minor leagues by the boss `children Ivanca and Jared .

The staff itself rides a roller- coaster with changing riders every turn. 

The big Cabinete meetings have many uncomfortable characters. There are the three Generals who seem to suffer their boss in loud silence. Joining them is the Secretary of the State, an ex-oil man running a half empty State Department who reportedly thinks his boss is a “fucking morao”. Add to them the secretary of health who hates health insurance, the Secretary of Energy who believes in abolishing his department, the billionairess Betsy Vosek of education who does not value public education, the Secretary of the Environment who does not believe in science and environmental regulations, the billionaire secretary of labour, who prefers robots to human labour since they neither go to lunch nor get pregnant, and if that is not enough, the Vice-President who does not miss a chance to hail the chief.

The two bosses ‘kids, Jared and Ivanka, are the progressives among the right-wing assortment of the WH. With little rouge on his face, Jared and Ivanka would look like a Renoir pair in 19^th century Paris. They are not however, a tableau on the wall, but rather two persona whose presence is fortified by their silence on most things. When they got activated, they advised the President to fire Comey and bring Scaramouchi from NY. After he was moushed (a new verb), they appeared again in getting Bannon “to suck his own cock”.

We have in addition Kate Walsh, the deputy chief of staff under hapless Briece Breibes, who attempted to organize the access to the big man. After she failed and resigned she was followed by 29-year-old Hope Hicks, the communications director, whom the President carries around as his most trusted aid. Like the President she does not read but she follows the media. She gets her input in the space of the 5-minute attention span of the Big-man as he repeats every half hour what he said before. 

The vernacular of Trump`s WH is inventively vulgar. There is shit and fuck on every tongue. Steve Bannon`s “no kidding” is “ don’t fuck with me” Firing somebody is telling him “to go suck his cock“ We are told that the President estimation of Africa is that it is a bunch of “shit hole countries”.

Several days after the publication of Wolff`s book, Susan B. Glasser of the New Yorker, interviewed him. He told her that Washington DC will bury Trump. Candidate Trump was supposed to drain the swamps of the town. But he is now drowned by its inhabitants.

Wolff told Glasser that he considers himself an outsider. He declared, “I am so not a member of this- Washington -club.”
 A New York author and columnist previously best known for a scathing, insider- takedown of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Wolff told her that, for assembling his materials, he had spent little time talking to, or worrying about, “the permanent establishment” of Washington.

He did not go to the Four Seasons for breakfast or to Georgetown cocktail parties for gossip. He said that he came down from New York, checked into the Hay-Adams Hotel, across Lafayette Square from the White House (where rooms, according to the Web site, start at more than three hundred dollars a night), and got to work, which by his account largely consisted of hanging out in the lobby of the West Wing of the White House, acting as a fly on the wall. Occasionally, Wolff allowed, he consulted with Mike Allen, the well-sourced journalist, whose daily e-mail newsletter for the Web site Axios often features leaks from the Trump Administration, as well as a “relatively small group of insiderish people, people who have been helpful to me.”

It’s clear that Wolff used his outsider status as a selling point with the members of the Trump team whom he persuaded to cooperate—and that they did so despite his long-standing willingness to break much crockery, and even basic rules of honesty and fairness, in the pursuit of a story. The Trump White House has seized on mistakes to call into question the book’s damning, and mostly accurate, a larger portrayal of this Presidency. For example, the book’s account of a breakfast at the Four Seasons last February, where Trump’s daughter Ivanka dazzled the wary natives in their natural habitat, mixed up between Mike Berman, a heavy-hitting Democratic lawyer and lobbyist who arrived in Washington, in the nineteen-sixties, as an aide to Walter Mondale and a young national reporter at the Post with the same last name. In the insiders ‘cannon, that is a pretty big deal.

 When she asked Wolff about the book’s factual errors, like the Berman mixup, he was dismissive, saying that he saw them as more or less irrelevant to the larger truths that he had told about Trump. Glasser thinks that Wolff talked like a man who couldn’t help but marvel at his own good fortune: he’d written a book that he thought might just bring down the President—and he was making a killing.

Wolff pointed out to Glasser“I’m going around saying, ‘It’s just a book,’ but it has become something so much larger,” he said, citing Trump’s attacks on the book and his failed attempt to prevent it from being published. “The President seems to think this book is some kind of significant threat, and that changes the context,” Wolff said. “Whereas with a regular book, a Mike Berman for a Mark Berman . . . would have been of no consequence whatsoever, now it’s suddenly a state question.”

But, she asked, what about the facts? Wolff’s attitude about them struck her as, well, a bit Trumpian. Would he fix mistakes in the next edition? “Yes, sure, the Bermans will be sorted out,” Wolff promised. But he still seemed to think that she was missing the point. “Fire and Fury” was like a Bob Woodward book, he insisted: a revelatory, scoopy backstage account of the White House with no sourcing or footnotes or explicit attribution. “The reader is basically going to have to trust me on that, or trust his own sense of, does this comport with everything else he knows?” Wolff said. “That’s how you get an inside portrait.”

Besides, Wolff added, all the second-guessing about details like who was at breakfast tended to obscure the fact that the book provides a vivid portrait of Trump based upon on-the-record quotes from formerly close advisers like Bannon and Katie Walsh. Even Wolff’s critics seem to accept that his over-all portrayal of a dispirited, demoralized White House, where many senior aides loathed and feared their boss, was basically correct. 
Glasser asked Wolff if he had started out planning to portray Trump so harshly. “I had no preconception,” he said. “I was perfectly willing to write a ‘Trump can be successful’ kind of thing, a contrarian view that is reasonably up my alley. Then I just started to listen to these guys, and they started to talk to me, and it was like, ‘Oh, God!’ These senior people say, ‘Do you have any idea what it is like to work for this man?’ ”

Wolff acknowledged that Bannon had belatedly apologized to Trump, but that he did not deny any of the quotes that Wolff attributed to him. “He hasn’t disavowed anything,” Wolff said. “He can’t, and he’s not going to.” As Wolff sees it, Bannon’s gradually rising dismay is the real theme of the book: “I saw Steve grow more disillusioned and angrier about what was happening in the White House—about the kids, about the fact that Trump really had no allegiance to Trumpism, or Bannonism, or whatever you want to call it.”

In the end, Wolff said, he had concluded that Trump’s big failure was to keep thinking that what worked for him in New York would work in a very different sort of city. “Washington is an institutional town. Those institutions are going to rise up, and, in the end, they are going to crush this guy, or they are certainly not going to give way to this guy,” Wolff added “He plays a New York game, and the New York game is, I can sell you anything—all I have to do is get attention. He’s a real-estate hustler, and that works in New York.”

Wolff may have Trump’s number, as one New Yorker of another. His reporting certainly comports with many of the accounts of the President that we all have heard and read in the last year. It’s a unique subculture with world-class champions in self-serving, name-dropping, and other political sports; Wolff didn’t need to join the club to capture it better.

So, yes, a few more facts might have made Michael Wolff’s mind-blowing revelation of a book at least a bit better. And all he needed to do in this case was Google them. 

All in all, we are entertained but frightened that a superpower that decides a principal part of the fate of the World can be led by such an assortment of operators. The President himself is too caught up in his ego and he seems to lack what George Washington was most concerned about: a civic virtue. Around him, there is nobody that he trusts enough to straighten out his unhinged behavior. He sets a new norm by behaving like the real estate hustler he was in New York. It seems that his new norm is greatly lesser than the old norm; one wonders how a great country can be led democratically by its uninformed mediocrities.