Fire and Fury

By Bill Lee

First off, there are no themes in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump Whitehouse that are new. The Trump Whitehouse is chaotic: check. President Trump is, to put it kindly, incompetent: check. His inner circle of aides are amateurs or near lunatics: check.

The book gains momentum, particularly near the end, but it has two major weaknesses: the storytelling and the cast of characters. First, Wolff’s method of narration is to extrapolate from what he heard in interviews or hallway gossip to expositions on what he believes the subjects were thinking at the time. This is a technique that Bob Woodward used in his books, often to irritating effect. The problem of course is that Wolff cannot possibly know what a person is thinking based on answers to interview questions or hearsay. Moreover, the reader cannot trust that Wolff’s account is accurate. The book also contains a lot of accounts that are unattributed and strain credulity. For example, in a description of the two Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric, Wolff claims that Trump confessed that when brains were being handed out, the two sons were in the back of the room. But it is unbelievable that Trump would actually say something like that about his family, which he is known to be very protective about.

The other matter is the cast of characters. As Wolff says in his prologue, reading David Halberstam’s magnum opus The Best and the Brightest, although the basic theme of the book was that all the smart and elite people around JFK still managed to screw things up, the reader would likely daydream that he was part of that scene because of its near Camelotian aura. But now with the Trump Whitehouse, I kept thinking while I was reading (actually listening to) the book: Why on earth am I bothering to read about these people? None of them, and here we can trust Wolff, has any redeeming qualities. Except Bannon. Although he’s a whack job, his riffs, in Wolff’s retelling, can, I admit, be amusing. But the Trump Whitehouse is the last place I would like to daydream about being in.

Go ahead and get the book. It can be entertaining. But be forewarned: you’ll wonder why you’re bothering with this lot.

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