Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

Michael Wolff, “Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House,” Henry Holt & Co. 2018, 310 pp.

The title needs work to better capture the book’s motif: something about ‘Potty training & public speaking’ might improve it; additionally, how about including a chapter on why it’s not good to build a two-story 6’ on-a-side outhouse, especially if you use the lower level.  This added chapter would certainly apply to Steve Bannon who was destroyed after publication of this book because of his many contributions.  While reading this book it occurred to me that SNL is threatened, how can you satire this White House—SNL has inadvertently become the same as News program and no-one watches news programs.  (By the way: I am a recovering Republican).

My Notes:

Pg. xif:  The contents of this book are based on conversations that took place over a period of eighteen months the author had with the president, members of his senior staff, especially Steve Bannon.  (The author had previously written some article favorable to Trump, so Trump gave him full access to the White House.)

Pg. 11:  Trump never expected to win, didn’t even want to win.  He was just polishing his brand and had already planned his response to losing the election: It was stolen.  (Yet, when he won he immediately believed he deserved it and had always wanted it).

Pg. 15:  The Trump campaign had inadvertently replicated the scheme from Mel Brook’s The Producers.  In that classic, Brook’s larcenous and dopey heroes set out to sell more than 100 percent of the ownership stakes in the Broadway show they are producing.  Since they will be found out only if the show is a hit, everything about the show is premised on its being a flop.  Accordingly, they create a show so outlandish that it actually succeeds, thus dooming our heroes.

Pg. 24:  Trump’s brain seemed incapable of performing what would be essential tasks in his new job as president, what neuroscientists would call executive function.  He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required.  On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.

Pg. 48:  Kellyanne Conway meant to say ‘alternative information’ but mistakenly said ‘alternative facts.’ 

Pg. 49:  On one of his first presidential events, Trump called on the CIA (January 21, 2017) where he proclaimed…’I’m like a smart person.’  He went on to claim that we should have kept the oil in Iraq…’But okay—maybe you’ll have another chance—but the fact is we should have kept the oil.’  He then went on, ‘The reason you are my first stop, as you know I have a running war with the media, they are among the most dishonest human beings on earth.’

Pg. 58:  Steve Bannon’s sponsors with money are Bob and Rebekah Mercer, who had set themselves up as almost professional fools.  Theirs was a consciously quixotic mission.  They would devote vast sums to trying to build a radical free-market, small-government, home-schooling, anti-liberal, gold-standard, pro-death-penalty, anti-Muslim, pro-Christian, monetarist, and anti-civil-rights political movement in the US.  They have, in effect, set-up a private Tea Party movement.

Pg. 102:  On February 13, 2017, twenty-four days into the new administration, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn became the first actual link between Russia and the White House.

Pg. 113:  Arguably, the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: he didn’t process information in any conventional sense—or, in a way, he didn’t process it at all.  Trump didn’t’ read.  He didn’t really even skim.  If it was print, it might as well not exist.  Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate.  Some supporters concluded this was one of his key attributes as a populist.  He was postliterate—total television.

Pg. 114:  But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen.  He preferred to be the person talking.  And he trusted his own expertise more than anyone else’s.  He felt that the liberal’s belief in expertise was vastly overrated.  After all, so often people who had worked hard to know what they knew made the wrong decisions.  So maybe the gut was as good, or maybe better, at getting to the heart of the matter.

Pg. 215:  There was on happenstance news, in Trump’s view.  All news was manipulated and designed, planned and planted.  All news was to some extent fake—he understood that very well because he himself had faked it so many times in his career.  This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the ‘fake news’ label.  “I’ve made stuff up forever, and they always print it,’ he bragged.

Pg. 218:  After publicly firing Comey, while Comey was in California to give a speech, Trump, the next day to further emphasize and delight in both the insult and his personal impunity, met with Russian bigwigs in the Oval Office, including Russia’s Ambassador Kislyak, the very focus of much of the Trump-Russia investigation.  To the Russians, he said: ‘I just fired the head of the FBI.  He was crazy, a real nut job.  I faced great pressure because of Russia.  That’s taken off.’  Then, to boot, he revealed information supplied to the US by Israel from its agents in Syria about ISIS using laptops to smuggle bombs onto airlines—revealing enough information to compromise the Israeli agent. 

Pg. 220:  Given the decision of the attorney general, Sessions, to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, it fell under the authority of the deputy Attorney general to determine whether a conflict existed—that is, whether the deputy attorney general, because of self-interest, might not be able to act objectively—and if, in his sole discretion, he judged a conflict to exist, to appoint an outside special counsel.  Without consulting the White House or the attorney general, Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to oversee the investigation of Trump’s, his campaign’s, and his staffs’ ties to Russia.

Pg. 253:  On June 9, 2016, occurred one of the most preposterous meetings in modern politics.  Don Jr., Jared, and Paul Manafort met with a movie-worthy 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. When this meeting became public thirteen months later it would encapsulate both the case against collusion with the Russians and the case for it.  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.

 Pg. 291:  Here’s where the title of the book comes from.  On August 8, 2017, Trump declared: ‘North Korea best not make any more threats to the US.  They will be met with the fire and the fury like the world has never seen.  He has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.  Thank You.’

Pg. 297:  To Bannon, if not to Trump, the linchpin of Trumpism was China.  The story of the next generation, he believed, had been written, and it was about war with China.  Commercial war, trade war, cultural war, diplomatic war—it would be an all-encompassing war that few in the US now understood deeded to be fought and that almost nobody was prepared to fight.

Pg. 308:  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.