'It's all
explosive': Michael Wolff on Donald Trump
Speaking to
the Guardian, author who shook the White House faces down critical fire and
presidential fury and says: ‘I got to a truth no one else has gotten’
by Edward
Helmore
A dinner of
clams and Arctic char at Michael Wolff’s Greenwich Village home set the stage
for a book that – in the author’s own estimation – has become “an international
political event”.
Among the
guests were former chairman of Fox News Roger Ailes, expelled from the Murdoch
empire over claims of sexual harassment and about to retire to Palm Beach, and
Steve Bannon, the would-be inheritor of Ailes’ rightwing political media crown
who barely six weeks earlier had orchestrated Donald Trump’s improbable
election victory.
“It was six
months since Roger had been thrown out of Fox so it wasn’t about having a
powerful person here, just the opposite,” Wolff told the Guardian from a low-slung
chair by the fireplace in his study. Bannon’s invite came next. “I asked him on
the spur of the moment: ‘Roger is coming for dinner. Do you want to come?’”
How Bannon
turned on Trump … and where the nationalist right goes next
Read more
As the storm
generated by Wolff’s Fire and Fury has swept over Trump, Bannon and the White
House, Wolff has wondered if Ailes vouched for him that night in January 2017,
perhaps over the baba au rhum dessert, even as the torch of populist
Republicanism was passed from one man to the other.
“I’ve often
thought this is a possible thing that happened,” Wolff said.
Either way,
it is the creation story of a book that demolished any illusions about Donald
Trump’s improbable White House.
The book’s
immediate effects have been well-described elsewhere. Among them, the
immolation of Bannon’s relationship with Trump and his Breitbart paymasters,
and Trump’s bizarre efforts to demonstrate mental competence that, as reported
by Wolff, his aides and inner circle routinely and openly called into question.
“Almost all
of the stuff that has been focused on seems kind of random to me,” Wolff said.
“It’s all explosive because that’s the thing about Donald Trump. He’s so
anomalous, so not what he’s supposed to be, that everything he does is at some
level preposterous.”
Is the
president incapable of carrying out his duties?
“I don’t
know if the president is clinically off his rocker. I do know, from what I saw
and what I heard from people around him, that Donald Trump is deeply
unpredictable, irrational, at times bordering on incoherent, self-obsessed in a
disconcerting way, and displays all those kinds of traits that anyone would
reasonably say, ‘What’s going on here, is something wrong?’”
This week,
Trump called a bipartisan, on-camera discussion on immigration and border
security. “This was clearly to establish himself as sane in reaction to the
book,” Wolff said. The meeting was strange for several reasons, including
Trump’s eagerness to agree with everybody there.
I don’t know if the president is clinically
off his rocker. I do know he is at times bordering on incoherent
“It fits
another premise of the book,” Wolff said. “He doesn’t care. He just wants
somebody else to do his work. He wants a win and the nature of the win doesn’t
really matter.
“I’ve
talked to a number of Donald Trump friends and cronies. He ran on the idea of
‘I’m a negotiator’ but they all say he’s never negotiated anything. Negotiation
requires detailed understanding. It’s methodical. He can’t do it.”
The
contrived display didn’t last. Trump was soon back to business-as-usual, referring
to Haiti, El Salvador and most of Africa as “shithole countries”, setting off a
new round of widespread denunciation.
‘This guy
is a complete fool’
On the eve
of publication, Wolff and his publishers were facing a legal effort by Trump to
block publication. It only inspired them to rush the book forward, after the
Guardian first reported its contents.
“It’s
another example of him being out of control,” Wolff says. “I know that
everybody was trying to stop him from doing this. He couldn’t be stopped. His
head had exploded, so he did what no president has ever done: attempt to sue
someone for defamation and invasion of privacy.
“There are two sides. I was sort of appalled
by an attack on the constitutional bulwark on what we do as journalists and how
we live as Americans. The other side, is this guy is a complete fool. All he managed
to do was call more attention to my book. He just shoots himself in the foot at
every opportunity.”
For Wolff,
the only change to his life so far has been to keep his wooden shutters closed,
to block the sight lines of occasional paparazzi. When he has left his house,
he has found himself propositioned for selfies with strangers.
Despite
Trump’s denials, Fire and Fury was authorized, albeit in the chaotic Trump
modus operandi. After writing relatively positive profiles of Trump and Bannon
for the Hollywood Reporter, Wolff joined the parade of job-seekers and
ring-kissers at Trump Tower in the weeks after the astonishing election result.
“I said to
the president, ‘I’d love to come down and be an observer at the White House.’
That’s when he thought I was asking for a job. I said, ‘No, no. I might want to
write a book.’ His face fell. He was completely uninterested. So I pressed a
little. I’d really like to do it. So it was, ‘Yah, yah. OK sure.’”
Thus began
a Washington adventure for a classic and controversial New York media scribe.
Visitor logs record Wolff visiting the White House more than 20 times in the
first eight months of the new administration.
“I went in
with the inclination to seem like a journalist with purpose but you lose that
when literally everyone is ignoring you,” Wolff said. “You really become part
of the furniture, this guy who is so pathetic, people really make an effort to
entertain you.
The truth is every book has … mistakes but not
every book rises to the level of an international political event
“Then
they’d say, ‘Who are you waiting for?’ Often that would be Bannon, who’d never
ever keep an appointment. So they go, ‘Uh uh yeah, wanna come back?’ Suddenly
you’d find yourself in the chief-of-staff’s office.”
Fire and
Fury has come under sustained criticism, in particular from the Washington
press corps. Last week CNN anchor Jake Tapper told chat show host Seth Meyers
it was a book that “abandoned all standards”. He also said there was “poetic
justice” that it would define the Trump presidency.
Criticism
has largely focused on misspellings and relatively minor fact-checking
problems. “The truth is every book has these kinds of mistakes but not every
book rises to the level of an international political event,” Wolff said.
Such
attacks may mask a larger issue: Wolff has eaten the critics’ lunch, as wolves
are prone to do. It seems it has taken the step-back view of an author to show
clearly the defining characteristics of the Trump White House.
“They’re
stuck in the weeds,” he said of the US press. “I’m clearly not stuck in the
weeds. I have obviously managed to convey this story in a way that people get,
that moves them and they understand.”
The problem
for the Washington press, as for everyone, is that the entirely abnormal Trump
presidency has been effectively normalized.
“In the
beginning,” Wolff said, “it was, ‘Don’t normalize them.’ But that is
effectively what they’ve done. There is an explosive story every day which
makes you forget about what happened the day before.
“So
suddenly this book comes along, provides a context and everybody – literally
everybody – goes, ‘Oh my God, now we understand this.’ The Washington press has
left everybody fearful, befuddled, desensitized and suddenly, from their
response to this book, people are able to say, ‘Yes I understand this...’
“I got to a truth that no one else had gotten
to, not that they didn’t know it. Everyone around Trump thinks he’s a
charlatan, a fool, an idiot and someone ultimately not capable of functioning
in this job. Pretty much nobody has said that although the Washington reporters
are talking to the same people I spoke to and getting the same stories.”
‘This is
not a book about my impressions’
Wolff has
been accused of obfuscating over how much time he spent with the president. The
White House maintains he was never granted an Oval Office interview. Wolff does
not claim to have had one.
“Let me say
clearly,” he said, “I had approximately three hours of conversation with Donald
Trump between June 2016 and now. Some of that took place during the campaign,
during the transition and in the White House.”
On page 92
of Fire and Fury, Wolff writes: “On 6 February, Trump made one of his seething,
self-pitying and unsolicited calls without any presumption of confidentiality
to a passing New York media acquaintance”. The call lasted 26 minutes, Wolff
writes, as the president attacked various media bigwigs, disputed reports of
Bannon’s influence over him, and said he was not the “kind of guy” to wear a
bathrobe.
The call,
one can surmise, was to Wolff himself.
“Let me not
say to whom the call was made,” he said. Instead, he insisted he never wanted
there to be any use of first person in his book, a technique that goes back to
the “new journalism” of the 1960s.
Wolff says
he is uninterested in politics. What fascinates him is people and power, and
the unprecedented scenario that emerged from Trump’s win.
“This has
happened, it shouldn’t have happened, no logic would have indicated it would
happen. But it’s there so how do you deal with it? This is not a book about my
impressions, it’s a book about the impressions of people around him. It was
important to me not to make my relationship or my impressions of the president
the focus.”
Bannon,
Wolff wrote, said Donald Trump Jr ‘s meeting with Russians in Trump Tower in
June 2016 was “treasonous” and predicted he would be “cracked like an egg on
national TV” – the words that led to his excommunication.
Bannon,
Wolff surmises, was already headed for the exit. But how could he be so
reckless as to disrespect the boss’s son? Was he drinking? “No. He was not
drunk. I’ve never seen him drunk, though I’ve seen him refuse drinks many
times...
“My theory
is he thought [the far-right Alabama Senate candidate] Roy Moore was going to
win. That would make Bannon kingmaker and Trump the loser. Bannon would have
gone into 2018 as the guy with all the leverage. Bannon had come to the
conclusion that Trump, in addition to being an idiot, was an impediment to his
true populist agenda.”
How does
Wolff feel about Bannon now? “I feel a little guilty that I put him in a
position he did not intend to be in. But he’s a big boy, and he was well aware
of the risks he took when he spoke to me.”
Wolff, who
would not say if he had heard from Bannon since his downfall, said he had been
“left wondering if he’s the ultimate strategic mind or just a guy who can’t
stop himself from talking”.
I feel a little guilty that I put [Bannon] in
a position he did not intend to be in. But he’s a big boy
Wolff will
soon set off on a European tour. He appears composed but there have been
sleepless nights, including the one after the Guardian obtained a copy of Fire
and Fury and Trump duly erupted.
He
discounted the idea of another celebrity presidency, saying he did not see
Oprah Winfrey running, and said: “I think this will stand as a cautionary
tale.”
He also
conceded that those could be famous last words.
“Look,
forget everything else. This is a fantastic story and these are phenomenal
characters. Trump is an amazing character. Bannon is, for me, a gift from the
gods. And on top of everything else, [Anthony] Scaramucci! Jared Kushner! It’s
too good to believe.
“This
experiment happened. Let’s make someone president who is different and in every
way the exact opposite of everything we think a president is and should be. That
was the experiment.
“The
positive here is people have realized the experiment has been a failure – even
a great number of people who voted for him.”
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