BOOK
REVIEW
Title:
FIRE AND FURY- Inside the Trump White House
Author:
MICHAEL WOLFF
Publisher:
Little Brown, 2018, U.S. /U.K./Hachette India
Price:
Rs.699/- in softback
The
First Nine Months Of The Trump Presidency
If Michael Wolff, the Manhattan based
glamour-magazine columnist and author of six prior books, wrote this one to
make money from the curious and the Trump-baiters, it is a thumping success.
The racy read about Donald Trump’s late
campaign and first nine months in the White House, cast by Wolff as an
unlikely, chaotic, even preposterous President of the United States, debuted at
No.1 on the New York Times Bestseller List. It sold over one million copies in
hardback in just four days. Worldwide sales are also terrific, and it is flying
out of the warehouses at Amazon.
But now, Trump has completed a year as President,
and Wolff’s book is growing rapidly out-of-date. Its subliminal suggestion that
the Trump Whitehouse and indeed his Presidency was about to implode, with
generous input from former top aide Steve Bannon, is seen to be an exaggeration.
Instead Trump has flawlessly delivered his
first State Of The Union Address to Congress. He has been steadily moderating
his stance in recent months without reneging on any of his more prominent
campaign pledges.
The economy has picked up to a GDP growth of 3%
per annum. Some of this, despite being a billionaire businessman President, is
because Trump inherited eight years of repair-work done by his predecessor
Obama. Still, it takes good luck to receive such inheritance.
The stock markets are booming. Trump has had
the courage to unilaterally announce the
relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, thereby recognizing it as the
capital of Israel. Saudi Arabia got into the President’s early good books by
ordering $110 billion worth of US arms, to be followed by $350 billion worth
over ten years.
Trump has repaired his relationship with the
bulk of the Republican Party and its Congressmen/Senators. He has raised import
duties on some Chinese goods as a precursor, and urged China to Make in
America. The original “Fire and Fury” military threat was Trump’s, to the
dictatorship of North Korea, though sensibly, he has settled for strict
economic sanctions for now. The Mexican Wall is still on the agenda and is
being financed as a quid pro quo on immigration with Congress. Some immigrants
are being given a pathway to citizenship, but Trump is still very opposed to
Islamic country immigration in particular.
Pakistan has had its military aid suspended,
and Trump gave it the most direct warning to cease helping terrorism that any
US President has ever done. Relations with India appear to have a lot of upside
potential.
Trump has been shedding campaign era factotums
and early appointees steadily, including many of those that populate Wolff’s
book. Notable amongst them is Steve Bannon, the Alt Right ideologue who had
outlived his purpose. A clutch of erstwhile Goldman Sachs advisors have also
been shown the door. The bid of the Democrats to discredit the President and
possibly even impeach him for taking help from Putin’s Russia during the
campaign has also come largely unstuck.The Nunes Memo from within the FBI,
indicates that the Obama administration was aiding the Hillary Clinton campaign
by trying to implicate Trump using the
FBI. Trump wants to made this memo public, but the FBI is naturally resisting.
However, it does compromise the Mueller Investigation into the matter.
There is also a simmering hostility towards the
Department of Justice (DoJ) and judges hostile to Trump’s executive orders. And a total lovefest when it
comes to the military.
Trump’s
JFK-style inclusion of daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner not only during
the presidential campaign but into the White House, has added an inside track
piquancy. This has survived the revolving door and is likely to last out,
despite outbreaks of focus on the Kushner family’s business dealings and
suggestions of financial impropriety. Ivanka and Jared are seen as a moderating
influence on Trump and he trusts them as family. Trust, otherwise, is not an
easy commodity to find in the Trump
White House, and he is always looking for “rats”
to kill.
Much of the outrage that finds voice in Wolff’s
book is the difficulty in digesting the presence of a billionaire real estate
mogul in the Presidency with no prior political experience, who improbably insists
on being his own man.
Then there are the personal habits Wolff
describes. Donald and Melania have separate bedrooms at the White House. Trump
often goes to bed at 6.30 pm with several television sets, his cellphone and a
cheeseburger. He has put a lock on his bedroom door. He is afraid of being
poisoned. He begins tweeting at 3.30 a.m. He is allergic to criticism and dubs
it all as “fake news”. He is inordinately susceptible to flattery.
The White House Press Secretary, several of
whom have come and gone already, finds it difficult to say whether Trump’s
tweets are policy announcements or just personal commentary. Obama didn’t even have a
private cellphone in the White House, and tamely surrendered his much loved but
unencrypted Blackberry.
Trump seems to favour a style, Wolff concedes,
in which he keeps most of the thinking and power to himself. He uses a cluster
of changing people, both in the White House and Administration to extend his
orders. He does not empower the Chief of Staff particularly, nor any of his key
Secretaries. He likes military men, particularly retired Army Generals, and fellow
billionaires in terms of his major appointments.
As things stand, attempts to portray Trump as
mentally unsound, a serial womanizer, dangerously incompetent, a foul-mouth, a
liar and a fool, are floundering. Wolff’s book, and a hostile Democrat section
of the US media has tried.
Donald Trump meanwhile, is pulling ahead, leaving his critics the
snakeskin of his previous avatar, and personally he thinks there is a second
term in sight.
For:
The Sunday Pioneer BOOKS
(957 words)
February
3rd, 2018
Gautam
Mukherjee
No comments:
Post a Comment