Review: ‘Fire and Fury’ in the Trump White House The author writes as if he were the omniscient narrator of a novel, offering up assertions that are provocative but often conjectural. Barton Swaim reviews ‘Fire and Fury’ by Michael Wolff.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-fire-and-fury-in-the-trump-white-house-1515369576
Michael Wolff has done what the rest of us chump writers can only dream of: He has gotten himself and his book denounced by a sitting U.S. president on live television. That, together with a cease-and-desist letter sent from the president’s attorneys to the publisher, will ensure not only that the book makes Mr. Wolff a truckload of money but also that it gets talked about for a generation. “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” is thus in a class with Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”—by itself a forgettable book, certainly not Mr. Rushdie’s best, but remembered forever as having provoked a death sentence from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.
Mr. Wolff was allowed to lurk around the White House for something like six months, presumably because someone in the first days of Donald Trump’s administration thought he would write a sympathetic account. It was an idiotic decision. Mr. Wolff is known in New York and Hollywood for his withering takedowns of popular public figures; he was only ever going to write one kind of book.
In one sense, “Fire and Fury” is a typical piece of “access journalism,” as it’s known, like many titles by Bob Woodward or, on the more gossipy side, like the “Game Change” books by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Mr. Wolff takes the genre to another level, and perhaps a lower level. If he has employed objective criteria for deciding what to include or exclude, it’s not clear what those criteria are. By the looks of it, he included any story, so long as it was juicy. We’re told, for instance, of Mr. Trump’s supposed method of bedding other men’s wives in his pre-presidential days; of Mr. Trump’s promise to his wife, who had no interest in being first lady, that everything was OK because he wasn’t going to win anyway; of the president’s scolding of the White House cleaning staff for picking up his shirt from the floor (“If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor”); and many other such weird tales.
Former chief political strategist Steve Bannon was evidently the source of the book’s most staggering revelations—if “revelations” is the right word for the sort of titillating office gossip that Mr. Wolff reports as fact. A typical story: Mr. Bannon, in a heated argument with the president’s daughter Ivanka, called her a “liar”—with a choice modifier to go with it. This took place in front of the president. The father’s response: “I told you this is a tough town, baby.”
Perhaps the book’s most important passage appears in the Author’s Note ahead of the narrative itself. There Mr. Wolff explains how he assembled what he learned from his interviews. “Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House,” Mr. Wolff writes, “are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book. Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”
Thus has Mr. Wolff encountered the most commonplace problem of reporting: what to do when two sources make contradictory claims. A responsible reporter, or one more scrupulous than Mr. Wolff, would seek out corroborating evidence or do more research. Mr. Wolff simply “settles” on his preferred version. CONTINUE AT SITE
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