Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House

The day I finished this book, I opened up my computer and saw that Hope Hicks, a "character" who is central to a good portion of this book, resigned. The day before, Jared Kushner - who is mentioned on nearly every page - had his security level downgraded. The Mueller investigation is still ongoing, and the future of Trump's presidency is very uncertain.

The reason I mention all of this is that the fundamental issue with the book is that, frankly, it was written too early. It's the first section of a nonexistent book called "The Downfall of the Trump White House." It feels incomplete, like the book ends when stuff is just getting warmed up, and the book would be stronger if it was written in the aftermath of Trump, or at least when the Russia investigations (which take up about half the book as-is) are completed. Narratively, it's unsatisfying to just end the book abruptly in the middle of all of these insane goings-on. I realize that Michael Wolff basically had this info and could sell a lot of copies of the book in the heat of the presidency rather than in the aftermath of it, but it just seems woefully incomplete.

Overall it's a good read - a bit rambly at times and of course I have no way to verify how accurate it all is, but it's definitely an enlightening account of this accidental president. Worth reading, I hope there's a sequel when these 4 years are up.

This book reads very much like a book-length newspaper article. For one thing, it's very timely: just three weeks after its publication, it has already started to disappear under a tide of new Trump-related news. By April, it will likely be hopelessly archaic, of interest only to Trump historians.
Secondly, Wolff collects information gathered from various sources. The result reads like a newspaper series, one too long and dense to fit in a single issue.
And finally, this book is what Wikipedia would call original research: Wolff has, apparently, collected information from some large number of interviews, and this book represents his attempt to organize them into some sort of coherent narrative.

On one hand, it's unfortunate that Wolff doesn't name his sources, or cite them in a way that allows us to check his facts. I hope that information will come to light in the future that either corroborates or debunks his facts, because as it stands, the credibility of the book is simply Wolff's credibility.
On the other hand, I didn't notice any huge discrepancies between what Wolff describes and what's widely known. That is, we may not have independent confirmation of what happened in Bedminster in August 2017, but we do know that Trump visited Bedminster at that time. So while Wolff undoubtedly got many of the details wrong, he's probably right about the big picture.

And the big picture doesn't hold any earth-shattering surprises: Wolff describes a candidate Trump who didn't think he would win, a transition that was chaotic because no one in the campaign planned for it because no one really believed Trump would win: they were supposed to get media coverage from the campaign that could be parlayed into consulting or lobbying jobs, the launch of a TV network, that sort of thing.
Finally, Wolff describes a White House in chaos because of the various actors and forces pulling and pushing each way, each with a different agenda. If you've been following the news, none of this is particularly surprising, though it is interesting to read the particulars.

The bottom line is, if you want to see what the buzz is (or was) about, read or at least skim this book. If you want to know what's going on in the White House, follow the news, and wait for future independent researchers to confirm or debunk Wolff's claims.

I'm a pretty active on Twitter (@AdrianAlvarez) and I follow the news and its analysis rather closely, so this book was interesting for me as a sort of behind the scenes of the most exhausting season of America I've ever experienced. Last year, it was hard to determine which of Trump's actions were a) born of a nefarious entity outside of the United States, b) born of a fully articulated worldview that hadn't been conveyed on the election trail but which belonged to Trump, and c) were born merely as chaotic byproducts of an inept shit show. If Wolff is to be believed, much of what we all went through last year belonged to the last category, and much of the dangerously articulated thinking was not from a nefarious outside government but from the wretched, apocalyptic mind of Bannon. I'm not convinced by his premise that Trump is too stupid and too dysfunctional to be responsible for the awfulness that was 2017 but a lot of the chaos and childish behavior reported of the president rings too true to be discarded. Trump runs his office like so many bastard producers I've had the displeasure to work for in Hollywood.

I debated reading this because I thought it might be too infuriating. Filling more of my time with this man seemed an act of masochism, however, what I found was a strange comfort in the notion that this president is so incredibly inept that without Bannon he really is limited to only certain kinds of damage: international embarrassments, hateful and ridiculous rhetoric, emboldened sections of society who are, yes, deplorable. I'm not arguing this isn't real damage but that the kind of damage that will be most lasting, the kind of cruel structural recoding of our policies and procedures that we will struggle to correct in our future really comes straight from the GOP in congress and has very little to do with this blathering buffoon and his cadre of dull witted "Bluths."

If there is any takeaway from this book I'd say yes it is dripping with juicy gossip but more than that, it removes any argument the GOP may try and throw out in the coming elections about their party being derailed by Trumpism.

Read it if you can stand it. It has no satisfying ending or even a directly stated argument but it is one hell of a page turner and it sets some context for the machinations of our embarrassing and dishonorable political era.

Audio book version of this is recommended, as apparently the text version does contain grammar and even spelling errors that may be annoying. I picked this up on Audible and it's a fascinating and horrifying portrait of just how far the White House and the GOP have descended into chaos and incompetence in the service of self-interest. While it's generally agreed that Wolff has exaggerated and embellished a few points, there is SO MUCH detail here (and much of it he does have on tape) that the overall picture it paints still seems clear and believable.

Watching the Trump administration from the outside, it's been hard at times to determine if there's some bigger strategy at work, some conspiracy to subvert what remains of democracy into a full oligarchy, some deliberate attempt to undermine the institutions of the USA. What this book does very well is illustrate that there really is no plan, no conspiracy, so scheme; it's absolutely sheer incompetence and ignorance fueled by self-interest and greed. And I'm not sure which is more terrifying. Trump doesn't have any sinister agenda; he has no agenda at all, and nobody on the White House staff has any control over what he says or decides, and nobody remotely qualified will even accept a job in the White House at this point because it's such a horror show. The book describes a White House so disorganized that there is no interest in filling any position that isn't media-facing; visitors arrive, are screened by military security, and then are left to wander the halls because there's no staff to greet and escort them to meetings. Wolff himself managed to just invite himself in and make himself at home for months on end with nobody to question him. Internal factions fight and undermine each other and the goal of everybody with any agenda is to get the president to think the idea was his own so it might get done, while Trump himself has no interest at all in doing anything but getting nice coverage from the media.

I'm really not sure if I was more scared when it seemed as if the Trump presidency was a sinister conspiracy to undermine democracy in the US, or after reading this book when it is clearly utter chaos and incompetence at every possible level with no clear goals at all. But either way it was a very interesting listen and has cast a new perspective on the daily news.

This book is really popular these days, so I bit. I got it and read it and it is exactly what you expect. A behind the scenes expose of the most incompetent lunatic to ever be elected president of any nation. Trump is obtuse, uncurious, uninteresting and egomaniacal. All he craves is love and adoration from everyone around him yet he offers nothing back. That much is not surprising.
Everyone around him believes him to be an idiot and barely tolerates him. His staff sees their ultimate mission to contain them and protect him from his own stupidity. They manage to do this sometimes, but not very often. This is also not a surprise at all.
How much of what is written int he book true? There's no way to tell, as far as I can see. But the fact that it is plausible says a lot of the shambles that the US has put in place of their government.
The book itself is not particularly well written or edited (hello typos).. but it is fun in a train-wreck sor of way.
It is a recommended reading with a short expiry date. If you read it soon, good on you join the party, if not... there surely will be much better books covering the same subject.

For me, there weren't any real revelations in here. I've always been of the opinion that he is too stupid for public office. I've never been able to take the leap of faith that makes some people think that he is some kind of master manipulator who just wants you to think that he's stupid. This book confirms what I previously thought.

It was sort of helpful to read this to help get a sense of the timeline. There have been so many bad actors in this story already that you find yourself getting them confused. Reading this book helped set me straight a few times when I found I was confusing who was who.

I was disappointed that there wasn't any coverage of the effects of protests. There was no mention of the Women's March. No mention of response to the airport protests and apparently the repeal of the healthcare bill failed purely because of Paul Ryan and not millions of phone calls made to Senators. So much was made in the book about him just wanting everyone to like him that I would have loved to see something about the effects of the protests on him.

Fire and Fury is both a fascinating and a frustrating read. The sources did not go fully on record in most cases, and the few who did are habitual liars. It's difficult to know how much of the gossip and sour grapes in the book come from actual events that truly happened or not. Wolff tells it like they said it with little editorializing and absolutely no fact-checking. You could really fall down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how many of the stories are based on real events. The run-on sentences and grammatical errors also get in the way at times.

That being said, there's a fly on the wall kind of guilty pleasure to reading the book no matter where you are on the political spectrum. There are enough factions represented that you're likely to find some stories praising your friends and roasting your enemies if you just keep on reading.

Other than a few typos, which I found a bit distracting, this was a sobering look at what many of us feared was going on in the White House. Told in a quite matter of fact way that did not seem to be going for shock value or sensationalism made it all the more believable. Combined with quotes from those he interviewed are the author's own impressions. If given a choice to believe a president who has lied every single day about easily fact checked events, and an author who was seen with a visitor pass on a nearly constant basis by white house reporters, I am more inclined to believe the author than a president who claims he wasn't there. There are a few descriptions of events that have been disputed as inaccurate but I don't think an honest mistake here and there (such as similar names being confused) negate the facts. Perhaps these were due in part to a rush to publish a week or so early in response to an attempt from the president to block the publication.
Considering the president's desperate attempt to block this publication, and considering the author's statement that some of his interviews are recorded. combined with the fact that nobody is disputing the actual quotes, I find it to be believable.

Even though there's nothing here we don't know already, listening to it all laid out in one continuous story compounds the insanity of each fact that has leaked out over the past two years, and the whole winds up being larger than the sum of its parts. It's also a reminder of how many characters have been packed into (and subsequently ejected from) the clown-car-heading-toward-a-cliff that is the Tr*mp white house, all in such a short period of time. The tone is gossipy and entertaining, such that you almost forget we're all watching Nero fiddle while Rome burns. I paid $24.99 for the audiobook rather than waiting for a library copy because I enjoyed the schadenfreude of adding my dollars to the no-doubt staggering sales figure for this book, one which will hopefully help bring on a fatal aneurysm for The Orange One. Whether you find it hilarious or depressing, I think you will at least enjoy the read.