Everything about Fire and Fury—both the revelations about
the Trump White House and the president’s reactions—is completely, profoundly
hilarious to me.
Instead of playing it cool
and ignoring the book’s allegations until people forgot about them, of course
President Trump flipped out, personally attacked Steve Bannon with a dumb
nickname, issued tweet after tweet about the book, and gathered his Cabinet
around in a tableau of sycophancy at Camp David to trash the book. Great work,
stable genius. Now the book is selling out and we’re on day six of the news
cycle as everyone debates whether or not the president is an incompetent
man-baby as the book portrays.
Trump’s reaction has
basically proven one of the book’s points: that he doesn’t know what he’s
doing. Any casual watcher of The West
Wing would have known that you stay above the fray in cases like these
because your reaction will only elevate the book’s claims. I’m no politician
and even I could have told him that much. There are so many of these types of
books about politicians and many sink without a trace but now he’s drawing
attention to this, attention it may not otherwise have had. As usual, he
brought this all on himself. By repeatedly saying “Of course I’m stable,” he’s
only making more people question his stability, because stable people don’t
have to assert their stability; they just act stably. This is just not the way
a competent professional adult responds to this type of controversy.
I think one reason this
book isn’t sinking into obscurity is because so many of the claims are
plausible, at least from the excerpts I’ve read. I completely believe he didn’t
want to be president and nobody in the Trump camp expected him to win because
it fits with what we already know. I completely believe he isn't stable because
a stable person would not have tweeted about the size of his “nuclear button”
to North Korea, among countless other examples. I completely believe Trump
watches TV all day because his tweeting chronology confirms that he’s watching
Fox News and doing whatever they tell him to.
Everything you need to know
about the president’s inability to rise to the responsibilities of his office
is right in the public record. The book just provides some gossipy details.
Once I get a copy, I’ll
take Michael Wolff’s revelations with a grain of salt, as you should always do
with these types of books. (I’ve heard Wolff can be sloppy but unless I missed
it, I haven't heard of any specific inaccuracies in this or previous work. Most
of what I’ve heard is journalists saying, “Ugh, this guy.”) Even if the details
in the book are not perfectly accurate, it is enormously telling that so many
people in the administration find the president to be unfit for office.
This is why Trump is not
going to sue anybody for defamation. He never follows through with suits in
these cases anyway because the discovery would destroy him. You’d see the
unseemly parade of administration officials testifying under oath that they
don’t think the president is a moron, and I’m not sure all of them would pass
the test.
As funny as many of the
book’s revelations are on the surface, there’s an outrage to Fire and Fury, and that is so many
people around the president feel he is unfit for office, and not one of them
has the guts to stand up. This is craven, opportunistic and shameful.
No matter the veracity of
this book, there is a greater truth here. People have lined up to buy a book
and when was the last time anybody did that for something that wasn’t Harry
Potter? This shows that a significant swath of the population just doesn’t have
much respect for the president. He said not to buy a book and they did, just to
spite him. If people don’t respect Trump, it’s his own fault, since he has very
little respect for anybody else. The last year has shown he can dish out the
criticism but he really can’t take
it.
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