Everyone knew what was in this book before anyone had read it, and the scoops skimmed off in the pre-publication headlines are now old news. Yes, here we have Bannon’s claim that the Trump campaign may have had a “treasonous” meeting with Russian agents, plus the dire warning that Ivanka thinks her brand is potentially presidential. Wolff inevitably likens the Russian cover-up to the skulduggery of Watergate, and briefly updates us on Pissgate and Pussygate – respectively the spurious tale of the golden shower in Moscow, and Trump’s better-authenticated braggadocio about his success as a groper (although, evidently believing that executive privilege protects his mendacity, he now claims that it “really wasn’t me” on that tape).
Fire and Fury also gives the lowdown on the lacquered trompe-l’oeil that is Trump’s hairdo, with those tinted tendrils combed over a cranium that is totally bald and resonantly empty. But beyond such acts of exposure, what makes the book significant is its sly, hilarious portrait of a hollow man, into the black hole of whose needy, greedy ego the whole world has virtually vanished. Wolff deplores Trump, explains the conditions that made him possible, and accuses us all of colluding in this madness.
He begins by asserting Trump’s nihilism, even his nonentity. The Fox ideologue Roger Ailes concluded that he lacked both principles and backbone. An economic adviser in the White House regards him as “less a person than a collection of terrible traits”. Or perhaps of terrifying tweets – Trump doesn’t and maybe can’t read, so he finds coherent speech problematic, and soon degenerates into doddery repetition or vile invective; Twitter is his chosen mode of utterance because it matches the spasmodic urges by which he is impelled.
Trump’s aides treat him as “a recalcitrant two-year-old”: the septuagenarian toddler spits the dummy on a daily basis. Rupert Murdoch thinks he is “a fucking idiot” and Rex Tillerson is alleged to have called him “a fucking moron”, the expletives in both cases registering exasperated disbelief at what Wolff describes as Trump’s rhymed combination of “stupidity and cupidity”. In response, he has proclaimed himself to be “a very stable genius”, which only confirms the previous assessments. This is the man who pronounced Xi Jinping’s name as Ex-ee, and had to be reprogrammed to think of his Chinese counterpart as a woman so that his permanently pouting mouth could utter the monosyllable “She” when they met.
To do him credit, Trump never wanted to be president, and, Wolff suggests, was as appalled as the rest of us when he won. The sole aim of his tawdry existence is to be “the most famous man in the world” – I wonder if infamy will do instead? – and his startling, shocking victory seems to Wolff a “trick of fate”, even an “abrupt comeuppance”. Unqualified for the job and incapable of doing it, unwilling even to behave presidentially, Trump’s revenge has been to trash the office he holds, paralyse government, and defame the country his baseball cap says he wanted to make great again.
Yet Wolff won’t allow us to entirely blame Trump on the red-state rednecks who voted for him and the Russian hackers who lent their illicit aid. It’s now his enemies who fuel his antics. Trump has no interest in devising legislation or conducting foreign policy; his time is spent watching himself on television, and Wolff charges journalists and news anchors with a reciprocal obsession. Trump, he brilliantly says, is “a symbol of the media’s self-loathing”. That indictment applies to Wolff in particular. He obtained permission to hang out in the West Wing after writing a fluffy piece about Trump for a Hollywood magazine, and he here betrays his confidential White House sources in the hope of salving his own bad conscience.
“I consider it to be fiction,” Trump has said of Wolff’s book. So do I, though I don’t doubt its overall veracity: it is what Mailer and Capote once called a nonfiction novel, with Wolff as an omniscient narrator who imagines himself at meetings he only heard about from others, and writes as if he were privy to the mental calculations of his subjects. Trump, being all id, offers no resistance to this psychological eavesdropping. “A lot of stuff goes on in his head,” he once said, astonished, about Bannon. Yes, Mr President, it’s what’s known as thinking.
Characterising Trump, Wolff draws on a range of American archetypes – the ingratiating huckster in Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the cornpone populist played by Jimmy Stewart in Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington – which represent the values he falsely claims to revere. Trump’s enablers have caricatural identities from pop culture. Jared Kushner is Jeeves, an obsequious but supercilious butler, while Ivanka resembles a prissy Disney princess; they merge as Jarvanka, which makes them sound like a Star Wars mutant, kennel-mates for Chewbacca. Donald Trump Jr, haplessly lured into schmoozing with Russians at Trump Tower, is Fredo, the dumb brother who has to be executed in the Godfather. Kellyanne Conway is nicknamed Nails, in tribute to her manicured Cruella de Vil talons. The squeaky-voiced homunculus Jeff Sessions appears as Mr Magoo. Anthony Scaramucci, AKA the Mooch, needs no two-dimensional prototype, since he is himself a cartoon.
Bannon, Wolff’s most indiscreet informant, receives more complex treatment, and Wolff speculates about what Updike or Elmore Leonard might have made of him. Liver-blotched, jowly, bulbous, Sloppy Steve is the very embodiment of a grubby Tammany Hall politician. Yet he fulminates biblically, using a mike like Joshua braying at the Jericho battlements through his trumpet, or rails as prophetically as Cassandra. And despite his religiosity, some colleagues revile him as a devilish Rasputin.
Bannon contributes mightily to the book’s scatological chorus, which begins when George W Bush describes Trump’s deranged rant at his inauguration as “some weird shit”. Later Bannon calls Don Jr’s Russian meeting “bad shit”; Wolff also gives him the last word as, anticipating new strife, he predicts that the future will be “wild as shit”. He also clenches prudently as special counsel Robert Mueller begins to probe the tenderest recesses of the Trumpsters. “My asshole,” Bannon announces, “just got so tight.”
Trump, however, vents like Etna, and his minders, Wolff notes, anxiously watch for signs that he might be about “to blow” – but at which end, top or bottom? Luckily the fire and fury here are mostly bluff and bluster, and Wolff thinks we are likelier to drown in Trump’s drivel than to burn up in a nuclear blitz that he might order as capriciously as one of the dozen Diet Cokes he chugalugs each day. Meanwhile our stunned fascination sustains him: he has become our guilty pleasure.
• Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff is published by Little, Brown (£17). To order a copy for £14.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
