From ‘Fire and Fury’ to Political Firestorm
Donald Trump on the South Lawn of the White House last December. CreditAl Drago for The New York Times
He is a New Yorker in Washington, far more consumed with the news media and personalities than policy issues. He elides facts, fudges the specifics and dispenses with professional norms in the service of success and status. And while affecting a contempt for the mainstream press, he cannot help dropping the mask to reveal the double game he is playing. I am talking, of course, of the writer Michael Wolff, who with “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” has delivered an altogether fitting, if ultimately unsatisfying, book on the chaotic first nine months of President Trump, another media-obsessed Manhattanite.
Wolff is, to borrow a recent phrase in the news, a sort of perfectly grotesque Boswell to Trump’s Johnson. The duo are a match made in heaven, or perhaps due south. “Fire and Fury” has detonated as few contemporaneous political books ever have, gripping an angry president’s attention for days, reigniting questions about his mental stability and prompting the excommunication of Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. Yet what makes Wolff’s account at once undeniably entertaining and lamentably unrewarding is precisely what makes covering this administration so frustrating. Politics and elections are my beat, so I can easily get pulled into stories about the Trump White House. But while the accounts can be sublime, at least to a scoop-hungry reporter, they can also leave one unsatisfied.
To put it mildly, it can be hard to attain the unalloyed truth from a president who has long boasted of gaming the press, or from competing courtiers who often wield insider anecdotes as sword and shield in their efforts to protect themselves and bloody their rivals. Then there is the sheer outlandishness of the Trump era: When most anything is plausible it is also printable, but that does not necessarily mean you are getting it right.
Wolff addresses the inherent challenge of reporting on this White House in an introductory author’s note, explaining that the recollections of sources can collide with one another and in some cases be untrue entirely. “Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book,” he says. To confront his problem, Wolff notes that there are times he lets “the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them.” Unfortunately for the reader, he throws up his hands when dealing with three of the most pivotal moments of the Trump campaign and presidency.
Ivanka Trump with her husband Jared Kushner and Gary D. Cohn, chief economic advisor, left, in the Rose Garden last April. CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
In recounting the 2016 gathering at Trump Tower among Donald Trump Jr., the campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and close adviser, and a group of Russians promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton, Wolff offers several “why-and-how theories of this imbecilic meeting.” But he does not settle on any one of them.
Second, in recalling the moment on Air Force One a year later when now-President Trump worked to produce a statement for his son minimizing the meeting, Wolff does not attempt to assess the veracity of the declarations of Kushner and his wife, Ivanka, that they were not part of any cover-up. “Ivanka, according to the later recollection of her team, would shortly leave the meeting, take a pill and go to sleep,” Wolff writes. “Jared, in the telling of his team, might have been there, but he was ‘not taking a pencil to anything.’”
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