Ny Times Book Review on Fire and Fury by Michael Wolf
Everyone in Trumpworld Knows He's an Idiot
One of the more alarming anecdotes in "Fire and Fury," Michael Wolff'due south incendiary new volume virtually Donald Trump's White Business firm, involves the firing of James Comey, former director of the F.B.I. It'south not Trump'southward motives that are scary; Wolff reports that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were "increasingly panicked" and "frenzied" nearly what Comey would discover if he looked into the family finances, which is incriminating but unsurprising. The terrifying part is how, in Wolff'due south telling, Trump sneaked effectually his aides, some of whom thought they'd contained him.
"For most of the twenty-four hour period, almost no one would know that he had decided to accept matters into his own hands," Wolff writes. "In presidential annals, the firing of F.B.I. director James Comey may be the well-nigh consequential move ever made past a modern president acting entirely on his own." Now imagine Trump taking the same approach toward ordering the bombing of North Korea.
Wolff's scabrous book comes out on Friday — the publication date was moved up amongst a media furor — but I was able to become an accelerate re-create. It's already a consequential work, having precipitated a furious rift between the president and his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who told Wolff that the coming together Donald Trump Jr. brokered with Russians in the promise of getting dirt on Hillary Clinton was "treasonous" and "unpatriotic." On Th the president'due south lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Wolff's publisher, Henry Holt, enervating that it end publication, claiming, amid other things, defamation and invasion of privacy. This move would be fascistic if it weren't so farcical. (While some have raised questions about Wolff'south methods, Axios reports that he has many hours of interviews recorded.)
There are lots of arresting details in the book. We learn that the administration holds special animus for what information technology calls "D.O.J. women," or women who piece of work in the Justice Department. Wolff writes that subsequently the white supremacist commotion in Charlottesville, Va., Trump privately rationalized "why someone would be a member of the K.K.One thousand." The volume recounts that after the political purge in Saudi Arabia, Trump boasted that he and Kushner engineered a coup: "We've put our man on top!"
Simply most of all, the volume confirms what is already widely understood — not simply that Trump is entirely unfit for the presidency, but that everyone around him knows information technology. 1 thread running through "Burn and Fury" is the way relatives, opportunists and officials endeavor to manipulate and manage the president, and how they frequently neglect. As Wolff wrote in a Hollywood Reporter essay based on the volume, over the by year, the people around Trump, "all — 100 percentage — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his chore."
According to Wolff, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the old chief of staff, chosen Trump an "idiot." (Then did the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of Play a joke on News, though he used an obscenity offset.) Trump's chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, compares his dominate's intelligence to excrement. The national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, thinks he's a "dope." It has already been reported that Secretary of State Male monarch Tillerson called Trump a "moron," which he has pointedly refused to deny.
And yet these people continue to either prop up or defend this sick travesty of a presidency. Wolff takes a few stabs at the motives of Trump insiders. Ivanka Trump apparently nurtured the ghastly dream of following her male parent into the presidency. Others, Wolff writes, told themselves that they could assistance protect America from the president they serve: The "mess that might do serious damage to the nation, and, past clan, to your own brand, might be transcended if you were seen equally the person, by dint of competence and professional person behavior, taking control of it."
This is a delusion as wild, in its own way, equally Trump's merits that the "Access Hollywood" record was faked. Some of the war machine men trying to steady American strange policy amid Trump's whims and tantrums might be doing something quietly decent, sacrificing their reputations for the greater good. But nearly members of Trump's campaign and assistants are simply traitors. They are willing, out of some complex mix of ambition, resentment, pessimism and rationalization, to endanger all of our lives — all of our children's lives — by refusing to tell the country what they know nigh the senescent fool who boasts of the size of his "nuclear push" on Twitter.
Maybe, at the moment, people in the Trump orbit feel complacent because a twelvemonth has passed without any ballsy disaster, unless yous count an estimated 1,000 or and then deaths in Puerto Rico, which they probably don't. There'south an erstwhile joke, recently cited past Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, that describes where we are correct now: A guy falls from a l-story building. Equally he flies by the 25th floor, someone asks how information technology's going. "So far, so good!" he says.
Eventually, nosotros'll hit the basis, and bold America survives, there should be a reckoning to dwarf the defenestration of Harvey Weinstein and his boyfriend ogres. Trump, Wolff's reporting shows, has no executive function, no power to process information or weigh consequences. Expecting him to act in the country's interest is like enervating that your cat do the dishes. His enablers have no such excuse.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/opinion/fire-fury-wolff-trump-book.html
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