Michael Wolff is a great story-teller, evoking strong images of people of Trump & Co. entangled in jealousy, intrigue, deception, incompetence, hubris, and ignorance. If the events had taken place in some distant, but familiar country, the narrative would be engrossing and even addictive to read as something in the tradition of Greek tragedy. The events are known from news reports, but Wolff provides color and immediacy. If anything, the breathtaking degree of detail is too great to be journalism, because the author could not have been a first-hand observer of many of the events. He does say that he had many -- anonymous -- interviews with people of the White House. Rather, the engaging narrative is more like "historical fiction", in which real events are described with embellishments to provide verisimilitude. Viewed in this way, the book is an engaging "page-turner."
However, the events that Wolff describes are real and take place in this country, and there are intense political connections. That fact changes everything. Depending upon the reader's political preference, this book may range from being a very engaging read to a despicable scandal sheet. The strongly anti-Trump readers will be having Raves, and the strongly pro-Trump readers will be in denial. There is room for readers between these two extremes to read, learn, and to reflect on the real events, apart from the embellishments.
I don't know Wolff's credentials as a journalist, but based on this book, he is a very good story-teller. He begins with the assertion that Trump & Co. had no expectation that he would win, and as a consequence, they were totally unprepared for that event. His narrative provides a clean timeline of major events that have been well documented by others. There were no huge surprises compared to existing public accounts of the atmosphere of the Trump World, and many of the accounts ring true with what has been said elsewhere. However, the amount of detail offered is new and breathtaking. It reads much like contemporary notes taken by a firsthand witness to the events. The author essentially states that that is not the case; rather he has assembled a narrative from information he received from numerous people within Trump & Co., whose closeness to the actual events described is not -- cannot -- be revealed. However, it is an easy conclusion that Steve Bannon was a major source.
One of the most important events described is the leading up to the meeting of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort with Russians in June 2016 at Trump Tower, and the fallout when knowledge of the meeting becomes public a year later. There is panic among the principals while traveling to and from Germany for the G20 Summit when the NY Times article is about to be filed. Wolff's narrative is exceptionally vivid in describing the mixture of panic, confusion, infighting, blame-laying, desperation, and incompetence of those involved in generating a response to the article.
One place where Wolff falls down is the Epilogue. It reads like an afterthought. The book should have simply ended with Bannon's departure and avoided the temptation of prognostication. Not only is the tone different from the rest of the book, but some of it simply did not work out "as planned."
There is an extreme irony: The satirical article titled "We Have a Serious Problem" by Douglas McGrath in the New Yorker of 18 January 2016 on the developing Trump candidacy could well be used as the prologue of this book. It begins with Trump deciding to run as a publicity stunt, and ends with him saying, "We have a serious problem ... I might win." At the time it was written, it was a harsh parody. Now, the meshing of the satire before and the reality now is unsettling. Harvey Weinstein is even mentioned in the first paragraph, albeit in a different context from that of today!
Think of this book as a good movie about real historical events. Whether or not the movie is correct in details, its vivid images form the lasting memory of the events. It will become a defining moment in the Trump saga, and it is a must-read for both opponents and proponents of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States.
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Popular Highlights in this book
Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win.Highlighted by 7,193 Kindle readers- The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.Highlighted by 6,411 Kindle readers
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About the author
Written with a blowtorch
This is an extremely powerful book. It is also the first of the major exposes on the Trump Administration, and the book that caused Steve Bannon to be fired from the Trump White House for being too open with the author. It’s actually quite amazing since Bannon often comes out poorly in this book and is ridiculed as a “misanthropic” person who believes he lives “on a higher moral plane than all others.” (p. 172). And it goes on like this. This book also has one of the most unflattering portrays of Trump that I have ever seen, and that is no small statement. If 1/10 of this is true it’s absolutely frightening.Also, whatever its faults, the book is an absolute page turner or in the case of an audiobook a disk turner.
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Important reading to understand today`s world
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