Function and Dysfunction in the White House

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
by Michael Wolff
Little, Brown, 2018, 336 pages, $32.99
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It is arguable whether Fire and Fury was an appropriate choice of title for Michael Wolff’s insider account of the Trump White House’s first year. The phrase—taken from Trump’s comments that he would bring upon North Korea “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it continued to threaten the United States—seems too portentous for a gossipy volume preoccupied largely with the apparently immense foibles of every single person the author came across during his investigations at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The book has garnered immense praise and criticism since its release shortly after the New Year—and has thus far sold 1.7 million copies. Although he claims to have conducted over 200 interviews, much has been made of Wolff’s laxity with journalistic convention. Many have pointed to significant factual errors in the book, and Wolff seems to take significant literary licence in recreating scenes he could not possibly have witnessed. Furthermore, some readers may have occasion to suspect his journalistic ethics—the degree to which conversations off the record were nevertheless given attribution—and the probity of his close personal involvement with some of the book’s key actors.

Still, Wolff’s background is as a catty New York media and society columnist, and a penchant for ingratiating yourself with your subjects before stabbing them in the back is likely a key to success in his chosen métier.

Whatever Wolff’s ethics and motives, the book does, to my mind, sound essentially accurate in its depiction of the key players—and nothing seems radically out of line with what we already knew of the functions (or dysfunctions) of the Trump administration. Despite the book’s hype, there are no seismic revelations, and little that hasn’t been alluded to or hypothesised about already in the general media.

The book is on its strongest footing as a study of characters. After eight or so months where he “took up something like a semipermanent seat on a couch in the West Wing” Wolff has provided us some striking character sketches.

Many will have picked up this book hoping for a peek behind the curtain at a would-be dictator. They will be disappointed. Rather, the Trump we find is a man without centre, alternately fulsome and irascible, who wants only to be liked—most of all by those least inclined to do so, among them Rupert Murdoch (who has called Trump a “f***ing idiot”) and the New York Times.

Trump’s two modes of social transaction are immense flattery or verbal abuse; whichever best serves his ego at the time:

He demanded you pay him attention, then decided you were weak for grovelling. In a sense, he was like an instinctive, pampered, and hugely successful actor. Everybody was either a lackey who did his bidding or a high-ranking film functionary trying to coax out his attention and performance—and to do this without making him angry or petulant.

Wolff would have us believe that Trump never in fact wanted to be president, and was expecting instead to launch a new right-wing television network on the heels of a martyr’s loss to Hillary Clinton. That he did win was apparently accidental, and the result of a takeover of the campaign by the billionaire Mercer family—a takeover that baffled Trump as much as anyone:

Trump had no real relationship with either father or daughter. He’d had only a few conversations with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables; Rebekah Mercer’s entire history with Trump consisted of a selfie taken with him at Trump Tower. But when the Mercers presented their plan to take over the campaign and install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Trump didn’t resist. He only expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told the Mercers, “is so f***ed up.”

Elsewhere, he is reported to have said of his whole campaign team, “We’re all losers” and that “nobody knows what they’re doing”.

In Wolff’s telling, Trump is far from a fiery ideologue. Rather, he is what he always has been—a people-pleasing, hot-headed and highly insecure media celebrity. His distortion of basic facts and his frequent accusations of “fake news” are not part of a malign political strategy, but the simple hucksterism of a showman for whom the media is always something to be manipulated in the interests of personal branding.

It perhaps stretches the imagination to believe that Trump’s victory could only have been accidental—something which if true would be a thorough indictment of the Democrats’ incompetence. Wolff credits the eventual victory largely to the work of Steve Bannon after the Mercers’ takeover of the campaign—Bannon being the only one who saw a path to victory and effectively targeted the electoral map in the crucial final months.

Wolff shows Bannon as a monomaniacal figure with a singular conception of his own worth and destiny. He is perhaps the most sympathetic and multidimensional character in the book, undoubtedly due in part to being Wolff’s most prominent source. A schemer and romantic who is “curiously able to embrace Trump while at the same time suggesting he did not take him entirely seriously”, Bannon talks in battle metaphors and the necessity of winning fights:

Within the first week, Bannon seemed to have put away the camaraderie of Trump Tower [where the transition took place]—including a willingness to talk at length at any hour—and become far more remote, if not unreachable. He was “focused on my shit.” He was just getting things done. But many felt that getting things done was more about him hatching plots against them. And certainly, among his basic character notes, Steve Bannon was a plotter.

Bannon is arrogant and has an unshakeable sense of his own forward momentum, and his willingness to engage in internecine warfare—particularly against the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter, Ivanka Trump (whom Bannon lumps together as a single entity—“Jarvanka”)—together with Trump’s irritation that someone else seemed to be taking credit for his success—is what eventually brings his downfall.

Bannon’s us-versus-them mentality—“shock and awe”, “dominate rather than negotiate”—is ill-suited to the grinding realities of Washington’s sclerotic political system. Orchestrating the much-criticised “travel ban” at the beginning of the administration—and delighting in the predictable outrage of liberal “snowflakes”—demonstrates his preferred modus operandi, but it falters in his attempts to influence foreign policy in discussions over Syria and Afghanistan, when he tries (and fails) to simply undermine his policy opponents rather than persuade them of the merits of his own view.

Yet if Bannon’s crash-through-or-crash approach ends in failure, Jared Kushner’s attempts to guide the President to a more moderate and conciliatory stance don’t fare much better. Shortly after taking office Kushner tries to set up a rapprochement between Trump and the Mexican president, in an attempt to ease the tension of the campaign. Kushner sees himself as “quietly following behind the President and with added nuance and subtlety clarifying the President’s real intentions” to the world. Sadly for him, his well-laid plans are nixed in an instant when the President again lashes out at his Mexican counterpart, who in turn cancels Kushner’s carefully planned visit.

“Jarvanka” are in general shown to be a preposterous and facile pair of social climbers, embodying exactly the dim-witted upper-middle-class elitism that Bannon and team rail against. Ivanka, seemingly oblivious to the discrepancy between her own politics and the expressed politics of her father, spearheads a number of incongruous initiatives drawn straight from the playbook of socialite Democrats—and seems to view her role in the White House as part of her own inexorably upward trajectory:

For Jared and Ivanka, as really for everybody else in the new administration, quite including the President, this was a random and crazy turn of history such that how could you not seize it? It was a joint decision by the couple, and, in some sense, a joint job. Jared and Ivanka had made an earnest deal between themselves: if sometime in the future the time came, she’d be the one to run for president (or the first one of them to take the shot). The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be Ivanka Trump.

Bannon’s response: “They didn’t say that? Stop. Oh come on. They didn’t actually say that? Please don’t tell me that. Oh my god.”

The chief merit of the book lies in its delighting in the absurdities of situations—Gary Cohn referring to Trump as “less a person than a collection of terrible traits” and Jared Kushner’s out-of-nowhere announcement at a lunch that he is an internet Unitarian minister, among my favourites—but there are too many to record here.

But it is the details regarding the ongoing “Russia investigation” (into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government) that has had many rushing to purchase Wolff’s book.

The details confirm what I already suspected. Insofar as there was any significant interaction between campaign staff and Russian operatives, it seems to be more the result of naivety and opportunism among Trump’s children than insidious political calculation.

Wolff summarises:

On June 9, 2016, Don Jr., Jared, and [then campaign manager] Paul Manafort met with a movieworthy cast of dubious characters in Trump Tower after having been promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Don Jr., encouraged by Jared and Ivanka, was trying to impress his father that he had the stuff to rise in the campaign.

He concludes, in my view correctly:

It was a case, or the lack of one, not of masterminds and subterfuge, but of senseless and benighted people so guileless and unconcerned that they enthusiastically colluded in plain sight.

The threat of the Russia investigation as Wolff depicts it is less to do with any smoking-gun evidence of clandestine meetings or contacts than with bungles and mishaps that have occurred as a result of the investigation—cover-ups, potential obstructions of justice—and what else the prosecutors and investigators will turn up in the course of their searches.

For Bannon, the path to taking down the President will be via further diving into the family’s and associates’ shady business dealings:

“You realise where this is going,” Bannon continued. “This is all about money laundering … Their path to f***ing Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner … It’s as plain as a hair on your face … It goes through all the Kushner shit. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me.

While all this is entertaining, it doesn’t add greatly to our store of knowledge nor clarify what would seem to many the more enigmatic question of the Trump presidency—namely, its successes.

Many of the conservative crowd loudly proclaiming themselves “Never Trumpers” before the election have fallen enthusiastically in line behind the President as things have played out. Why should this be?

Well—in addition to his win on tax cuts, he has pursued a thoroughgoing deregulatory agenda, boosted business confidence and growth, slashed illegal immigration, pursued a hawkish but fairly stable foreign policy, filled courts with conservative judges. That is to say, all the things conservatives have been dreaming of for years.

Problems of course remain. Healthcare reform is needed, the deficit is ever expanding (and Trump shows no appetite to rein it in), entitlement reforms are much needed and politically impossible, and America still needs a significant revamp of its infrastructure. (Trump continually nods to such a revamp, but I’ll believe it when I see it.) But it’s unclear whether these problems would be any less prevalent if anyone else were in office—and the positives of the Trump administration would almost certainly have not occurred under Hillary Clinton.

It is true also that Trump hasn’t delivered much to his base of down-on-their-luck white working-class men and women. While the cuts to illegal immigration would please many, the deregulatory agenda may cause further economic instability down the road, and they continue to wait for the infrastructure renewal and domestic rebuilding inherent in the campaign slogan “America First”.

Whether they will abandon him if he runs for re-election is far from certain, however, especially given how much of their enthusiasm is based on Trump’s raw charisma.

Wolff quotes Bannon as being highly sceptical of the prospect of a Trump second term:

Steve Bannon was telling people he thought there was a 33.3 percent chance that the Mueller investigation would lead to the impeachment of the president, a 33.3 percent chance that Trump would resign, perhaps in the wake of a threat by the cabinet to act on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment (by which the cabinet can remove the president in the event of his incapacitation), and a 33.3 percent chance that he would limp to the end of his term. In any event, there would certainly not be a second term, or even an attempt at one.

One would be unwise to second-guess someone so close to the action. But if Trump were to run again, he would have the advantages of incumbency, potentially a very strong economy, and having disproved the concern of the Never Trump conservatives that he would be completely chaotic (at least in the policy sense). If his base refuses to leave his side, he could yet be a formidable opponent.

Such speculation remains simply that. And enjoyable though Michael Wolff’s book is, it has simply added to the speculation surrounding the Trump presidency while doing little to clarify it.