The Book That Ate Washington

Or scratch that—it is not a book. It is the book. If there is only one book Washington political reporters will read this year—and for many, one book a year is their outer limit, as reading gets in the way of more vital swamp-creature pursuits like pretending expertise, being gossipy hens, and tweeting—then this is it.

As with most chattering-class blockbusters that catch on with the general public (number one on Amazon, a million copies and counting sold in less than a week), one needn’t go through the trouble of actually reading the book to have authoritative opinions on it. But read it I did anyway, right down to the author’s note where Wolff states that many of the accounts in Fire and Fury are in conflict with one another and many, “in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue .  .  . and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself” is “an elemental thread of this book.” Or put another way: Despite him weighing the evidence and settling “on a version of events I believe to be true,” everything that follows might be a lie. Which makes Wolff, who has been criticized by the punditry for everything from violating off-the-record agreements to being a slop artist (more on that later), that rarest of creatures in Washington: a crude approximation of an honest man.

Wolff, a Manhattanite who holds court at Michael’s and who has for decades made his bones writing about media and moguls and preferably media moguls (he wrote a biography of Rupert Murdoch), is a wicked stylist and keen observer, with a justly earned reputation for approaching his subjects with fangs bared and talons sharpened. He can come off as meekly obsequious and sinister simultaneously—on television, the effect is Fred Armisen meets Nosferatu. So it came as some surprise when word got out last fall that Wolff had effectively turned himself into a potted plant in the West Wing, spending the better part of Trump’s first year in office absorbing all the palace intrigue. Why on earth did they let him in? Everyone knows the White House has Twitter. Don’t they have Google?

It helps, of course, to have a rabbi, and Wolff clearly did in the person of “The Great Manipulator” (as Time dubbed Steve Bannon when they slapped Trump’s then-chief strategist on their cover, much to Trump’s chagrin, since he doesn’t like competing for attention with the hired help). Wolff says he did 200 interviews, and I wouldn’t be surprised if around 180 of them were with Bannon. If the book came with sound effects, the loudest would be that of Bannon grinding his battle-axe.

Bannon will now have much more time to spend with his weaponry after sounding off about Trump and family in Wolff’s book. (Trump’s lawyers took time out of their busy schedules dodging multiple Russian-collusion investigations in order to threaten to sue both him and Wolff, while Trump christened Bannon “Sloppy Steve.”) As a result of crossing Trump, Sloppy’s financial backers have dumped him, he’s lost his Sirius/XM radio show, and he’s been ousted from his perch as bomb-thrower-in-chief at Breitbart. To add insult, on the very day Bannon’s Breitbart exit was announced, Trump indicated that he might cut an immigration deal with Democrats, and the White House advertised he would be visiting that globalist playpen Davos. No word yet whether anti-immigration, nationalist scourge Bannon will now commit seppuku just so he can roll over in his grave.

But what comes through loud and clear in Wolff’s telling is that no matter how bad you thought it was in Trump’s White House, it was actually much worse. From the end of what Bannon called, with characteristic gentility, Trump’s “broke-dick campaign,” through the transition, and all the way through Bannon’s ouster last August, Team Trump didn’t resemble a team so much as a collection of competing brand managers fighting in a loser-leaves-town cage match. For an administration that pretends to hate the “fake news” media, members leaked so much and so often that some even hired dedicated press staffs and leaked about each other leaking. Each faction (Bannon representing the populists, then-chief-of-staff Reince Priebus representing establishment Republicans, and “Jarvanka”—Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump—representing themselves) was trying to capture Trump’s ever-diminishing attention. None of them was as interesting to the president as watching his own cable-news coverage, DVRing talking-head slights to replay and obsess over while he ate cheeseburgers in bed, barking on the phone to his one-percenter pals, soliciting advice on important matters of state such as who he should fire next. “We serve at the president’s displeasure,” says one staffer to Wolff.

Characterizing Trump’s vinegar sessions to friends, Wolff writes that he’d mull over the flaws of each member of his staff: “Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looked like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short—a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. [Sean] Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). [Kellyanne] Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.” While an unflattering depiction of Trump, it does bolster his credentials as a shrewd judge of character.

All the assembled characters, though, are present due to Trump’s suspect judgment in the first place. Forget the fact that Bannon—someone who thinks it’s acceptable to prop up an accused child molester (Roy Moore) running for Senate—effectively serves as the “conscience” of the administration in Wolff’s narration, the one true ideologue keeping Trump faithful to his base. There was a hint much earlier on that the White House might be in over their heads, when it fell to Ann Coulter to clock in as the moderating voice of reason, taking the president-elect aside to say, “Nobody is apparently telling you this. .  .  . You just can’t hire your children.”

There’s very little policy discussed in Fire and Fury. Wolff, like Trump, isn’t much interested in it. But to compensate, there’s plenty of derisive name-calling and vicious put-downs. (All cheeseburger, no vegetables.) With mostly thin-to-invisible sourcing on Wolff’s part, Trump assesses the room like Rickles in the Catskills, often working blue. To Bannon, whom Trump says “everybody hates,” he offers, “Guy looks homeless. Take a shower, Steve. You’ve worn those pants for six days.”

Bannon’s deep-pocketed backers, the Mercer family, are “wackos.” His trusted press aide, Hope Hicks, Trump says somewhat jokingly, is “the world’s worst PR person.” Though Trump puts some balm on that wound, allegedly telling her she’s “the best piece of tail [Corey] will ever have.” (Wolff thereby suggests she and Trump’s married former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, had a fling.)

Sally Yates, briefly acting attorney general until Trump fired her, is “such a c—.” Gary Cohn, Trump’s National Economic Council director, is “a complete idiot, dumber than dumb.” Jarvanka “should take the hint and go home,” while H. R. McMaster, his global-strategy-lecturing national security adviser, “bores the shit out of me.” Besides, when he’s out of uniform in his baggy suit, “he looks like a beer salesman.”

Following their Dear Leader’s lead, everyone in Trump’s orbit seemed to return the favor, both to him and each other. Kushner calls then-deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh “demanding and petulant.” While Bannon variously calls Kushner “my intern,” Jarvanka collectively “the geniuses,” and Don Jr. “Fredo,” after the dimwitted son in The Godfather, saying his dalliances with Russians would result in investigators cracking “Don Jr. like an egg on national TV.” Likewise, Bannon tells Hicks she is as “dumb as a stone” and informs Ivanka, who he thought was “dumb as a brick,” that she’s a “f—ing liar.” He says that last bit in the Oval Office, in front of her dad. (“I told you this is a tough town, baby,” Trump offers his daughter, by way of consolation.)

More generously, Bannon calls himself “President Bannon.”

But we’re not done yet. According to Wolff, Priebus and Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin think Trump’s an “idiot,” McMaster thinks he’s a “dope,” and Cohn thinks he’s “dumb as shit.” After the book’s publication, when a White House official told a CNBC reporter that Cohn “denies that ridiculous quote,” Cohn must have forgotten to walk back a widely circulated email attributed to him, which described working for this White House:

Bannon, elsewhere in Fire and Fury, likens Trump to a 9-year-old child, says he has “lost his stuff,” and informs Wolff that there’s a 33.3 percent chance the Mueller investigation will lead to his impeachment, a 33.3 percent chance that Trump will resign if, say, the cabinet attempts to have him removed under the 25th Amendment, and a 33.3 percent chance he will “limp to the end of his term.” But in a sunnier assessment, he does allow that Trump is “a big warm-hearted monkey.”

With this kind of rancor and ineptitude, it’s small wonder that Trump’s only major legislative accomplishment in his first year was passage of a tax bill (if we can count cutting corporate America’s tax rate by 40 percent a legislative achievement for a purportedly populist president whose chief aim was to look out for the little guy). Perhaps there wasn’t time to do much else, what with all the insults that needed tending to.

Most White Houses are what the late David Carr liked to call ego gymnasiums, full of climbers trying to guard or expand their influence. If Trump’s seems more cutthroat than most, it’s not by accident. It’s part of his top-down ethos, from interactions with aides to antagonizing the media and investigators. As Wolff notes:

Wolff’s book, as you might have heard, launched into the exosphere several days before its originally scheduled publication date after excerpts were leaked and then helped along by Trump threatening to block publication while tweeting his thumbs off denouncing it: “Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book.” Wolff, who doubts whether Trump reads books, even the ones Trump “writes,” wondered to Savannah Guthrie on The Today Show: “Where do I send the box of chocolates?”

As Wolff was now getting stalked by paparazzi (hard to imagine that happening to, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin) and making the TV rounds (MSNBC in particular rode him like a rented mule), in print outlets, and all over social media, one mouth-watering morsel after another dribbled out. Any of which could’ve served as the cherry on top of the sundae, or maybe the entire sundae, in a more conventional political book. A (very) incomplete sampling:

* Ivanka and deputy national security adviser Dina Powell creating a photographic presentation of Syrian kids foaming at the mouth after a chemical weapons attack to prompt Trump to action (Trump abhors PowerPoints or spreadsheet jockeys and “liked literal big pictures,” writes Wolff.)

* Campaign aide Sam Nunberg being sent to explain the Constitution to Trump, getting as far as the Fourth Amendment “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling to the back of his head.”

* In pre-presidential days, Trump moving in on a friend’s wife by having the friend sit in his office at Trump Tower and asking him explicit sexual questions (“You must have had a better f— than your wife”) while the wife listens in on speakerphone.

* Trump complaining to a friend that everyone exaggerates his exaggerations.

* Joe Scarborough frantically asking Trump if there’s anyone he talks things through with before he decides to act, and Trump saying, “you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.”

I could go on. And on and on. But why? We’ll both just get more demoralized.

Yet after Wolff’s book release, there was another steady drip—that of Wolff’s credibility being called into question. Some of it came from predictable quarters: conservative media and the Trump White House. Alex Jones’s conspiracy-theory hub, Infowars, ran a whole piece detailing how a YouTube body language expert determined that Wolff was lying. Trump surrogates hit the editorial pages and airwaves. Stephen Miller, a one-time Bannon loyalist and Trump’s senior adviser for policy (a 32-year-old who seems to be one of the few senior advisers Trump has left when not consulting himself), practically yelled at CNN’s Jake Tapper, calling Wolff’s book “garbage” and a “grotesque work of fiction.”

Plenty of others who made cameos in the book also denounced their portrayals. A spokesperson for Vogue editor Anna Wintour said it was “laughably preposterous” that she’d approached president-elect Trump suggesting that she become his ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. While a representative of former British prime minister Tony Blair said Wolff’s claim that he paid a visit to Kushner at the White House to chummily inform him of a juicy rumor that the Brits had Trump campaign staff under surveillance and were monitoring their calls was “categorically absurd.”

Likewise, mainstream and even liberal press outfits (Vox, Slate, the New Republic) all ran pieces picking apart factual inconsistencies in Wolff’s narrative. Most errors were of an embarrassing but fairly minor variety—confusing the identities of people at a restaurant, getting ages or spellings wrong—not enough to blow a hole in Wolff’s hull. But some mistakes were real howlers.

In one of the worst instances, Wolff quotes the late Roger Ailes as telling Trump shortly after the election: “You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff. And you need a son of a bitch who knows Washington.” Ailes suggested former House speaker John Boehner. To which Trump asked, “Who’s that?”

The problem, as reporters discovered, is that Trump had tweeted about Boehner numerous times before the election and had even played golf with him. Oops.

There is a noticeable glee emanating from diligent, mainstream, fact-checking reporters trying to take Wolff down a peg, even as they spend most of their days inclined to disbelieve everything Donald Trump says otherwise. The reason for this could be attributable to several factors:

They might be jealous of Wolff making the big score on their home turf. Or there could be resentment of Wolff doing the talk-show rounds, making delusional pronouncements that his book could be the end of the Trump presidency (about as likely as Wolff becoming president) while declaring that he has shown that the emperor has no clothes. Any reporter with a room-temperature IQ and working pairs of eyes and ears had a hunch that if not buck naked, Trump was down to a loincloth and golf cleats even before he took the boss’s chair.

Or maybe Wolff’s factual lapses just offend their sense of propriety: While doing the unglamorous daily drudge-work, they have to be scrupulous and exacting; why shouldn’t he? Wolff has a long history of not only gnawing on his media competition’s skulls for column fodder and his own amusement but also playing fast and loose with facts.

Twenty years ago, the now-defunct Brill’s Content took a hard look at Wolff’s book Burn Rate, a memoir of his time as a dot-com hustler, and charged that one of his characters was actually a composite of three people. Likewise, seven of Wolff’s main characters and six others who were either portrayed in or familiar with events in his book claimed he “invented or changed quotes,” and none remembered him taking notes on or taping their discussions.

Wolff, for his part, told Brill’s that he had notes and email to back him up but refused to release them. (He says he’s recorded many of his Fire and Fury subjects, as well, but has similarly declined to release those.) Then, with a Trumpian flourish, he told Brill’s: “I’m sure people are very surprised to see these meetings come back to life. But that’s good writing. That may be great writing.”

So it’s perhaps understandable that some rivals and marquee journalists have, over the years, called Wolff everything from one of “the most hated figures in New York media” (Michelle Cottle) to a “despicable .  .  . hyena” (Jack Shafer) to “someone who is rarely impressed with anyone other than himself” (Howard Kurtz) to “fearless in a way that people attribute to sociopathology but that I always thought was a business strategy” (David Carr). Back in 2004, Cottle, in a Wolff profile for the New Republic, reported that a friend of Wolff’s heard a senior official at the New York Times “snipe that ‘if Wolff were any further up his own ass, he’d be a colonoscopy.’ ” This go-round, GQ’s Drew Magary proclaimed that Wolff is a “fart-sniffer whose credibility is often suspect .  .  . who represents the absolute worst of New York media-cocktail-circuit inbreeding” and who is “one of our least reliable journalists.” And Magary is one of Wolff’s defenders.

Personally, I’ve enjoyed reading Wolff over the years. You can call him many things (see the preceding paragraph), but never dull. I do not know Wolff nor can I vouch for his credibility. Though I should add that a mutual acquaintance of ours, after spotting an anecdote he’d casually tossed off to Wolff turn up in Fire and Fury, reported this to me of Wolff’s seemingly slack methodology: “[He got it] from me, which I got from a woman on the beach in Florida, who heard it in a carpool line. Literally. I had no idea he was including it. That guy is a serious bullshit artist. Wow.”

Whether Wolff is or isn’t a bullshit artist, one can argue that the most pressing concern surrounding Fire and Fury isn’t that we don’t know for certain what we should or shouldn’t believe. Rather, it’s that so much of it is believable. Whether Trump did or didn’t do these things, they’re completely within the realm of possibility. This is the same president, after all, who just one day before the Fire and Fury hubbub broke compared—on Twitter—the size of his nuclear “button” to that of Kim Jong-un. (Spoiler alert: Trump’s is “a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”)

What is also indisputable is that Trump might be the most prevaricative president of the last half-century—no easy feat, considering Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton belong to the club. Last year, the New York Times kept a running tally of all the lies Trump told, with supporting links, in a feature simply titled “Trump’s Lies.” From the time they started counting, the day after his inauguration, until they let the feature lapse on November 11 (perhaps because it was no longer sporting), they counted no fewer than 179 lies. Including an impressive streak in which Trump “said something untrue, in public, every day for the first 40 days of his presidency.”

At that clip, he likely would’ve scored higher were it not for days in which he was “absent from Twitter, vacationing at Mar-a-Lago, or busy golfing.” The last of which, according to those who’ve played with him, sees him cheating more than lying.

On The Today Show, Wolff, upon being asked about Trump calling into question his credibility, responded that he was being assailed by “a man who has less credibility than perhaps anyone who has walked the earth.” This is a fair point. By the same token, a new Morning Consult/Politico poll shows only 32 percent of registered voters find Fire and Fury to be “very” or “somewhat” credible. (Twenty-five percent found it “not too” or “not at all” credible, and an enviable 42 percent hadn’t heard of it or had no opinion.)

Michael Wolff might not be the Platonic ideal of Trump’s Boswell, crossing all his “t”s, meticulously logging footnotes. He may very well represent something much more cosmically valuable to Trump, though: a perfect karmic delivery system.

Matt Labash is a national correspondent at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.