7 Questions We Have After Reading ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House’<\/b>
\nPerhaps inevitably, Michael Wolff\u2019s eagerly-anticipated account of life inside Donald Trump\u2019s administration has become an instant bestseller, with it\u2019s depiction of a \u201cdumb as shit\u201d President bumbling his way from one scarcely believable gaffe to the next.<\/p>\n
\u2018Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House\u2019 is a godsend for the many detractors of Trump as we learn how he apparently never even wanted to be President, is mocked by his closest aides, and even\u00a0why his hair is a shade of orange.<\/p>\n
It also raises many questions – let\u2019s start with the big one:<\/p>\n
1) IS ANY OF IT ACTUALLY TRUE?<\/p>\n
The book itself contains a disclaimer in its early pages that reads:<\/p>\n
\u201cMany of the accounts of what has happened in the White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are badly untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.\u201d
\nThe White House has rubbished the book saying it is riddled with errors, and campaign and administration officials have disputed events depicted.<\/p>\n
And yet none of this matters – even if every anecdote contained within its pages remains unproven, Trump\u2019s reaction to publication has already confirmed its main theme which Wolff summed up in an interview on NBC\u2019s \u201cToday\u201d program on Friday.<\/p>\n
When asked to clarify what he meant when he wrote that Trump\u2019s entire circle questioned his fitness for office,\u00a0he said:<\/p>\n
Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad! t.co\/mEeUhk5ZV9<\/a><\/p>\n January 6, 2018 January 5, 2018 January 4, 2018 \u201cThe kids\u00a0– Jared and Ivanka – exhibited an increasingly panicked sense that the FBI and DOJ were moving beyond Russian election interference and into family finances.\u201d Bannon is also quoted as saying:<\/p>\n \u201cThis is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor\u00a0Andrew] Weissmann\u00a0first and he is a money-laundering guy<\/a>. Their path to fucking<\/a> Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner \u2026 It\u2019s as plain as a hair on your face. \u201cThey\u2019re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.\u201d \u2018Fire and Fury\u2019 paints an almost tragic figure of the First Lady, alleging Trump loves to \u201cpursue the wives of friends\u201d and goes to bed not with his wife,\u00a0but with a cheeseburger and three TVs.<\/p>\n It adds:<\/p>\n \u201cDonald Trump\u2019s marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him – or it was for those without private jets and many homes. He and Melania spent relatively little time together. They could go days at a time without contact, even when they were both in Trump Tower. Often she did not know where he was, or take notice of that fact. Her husband moved between residences as he would between rooms. Along with knowing little about his whereabouts, she knew little about his business, and took at best modest interest in it. An absentee father for his first four children, Trump was even more absent for his fifth, Barron, his son with Melania.\u201d After hearing Donald Trumps latest insult \u201cSloppy Steve\u201d let me commend Melania of really kicking her cyber bullying campaign in high gear in 2018. Three separate passages in the book coalesce to apparently demonstrate one incredibly worrying trend.<\/p>\n Firstly, his apparent lack of knowledge of any of the issues that face a President day-to-day:<\/p>\n \u201cAlmost all the professionals who were now set to join him were coming face to face with the fact that it appeared he knew nothing. Everything with him was off the cuff. Whatever he knew he seemed to have learned an hour before – and that was mostly half-baked.\u201d \u201cThe next morning, seething, the President again publicly attacked his Attorney General and – for good measure and no good reason –\u00a0 tweeted his ban of transgender people in the military. (The President had been presented with four different opinions related to the military\u2019s transgender policy. The presentation was meant to frame an ongoing discussion, but ten minutes after receiving the discussion points, and without further consultation, Trump tweeted his transgender ban.)\u201d<\/p>\n Thirdly, how easily he was influenced by a simple picture presentation to launch missiles into Syria:<\/p>\n \u201cIvanka had long ago figured out how to make successful pitches to her father. You had to push his enthusiasm buttons.\u00a0When\u00a0[Ivanaka and Deputy National Security Advisor Dina Powell]\u00a0showed the presentation to the president, he went through it several times. He seemed mesmerised. \u201cWatching the president\u2019s response, Bannon saw Trumpism melting before his eyes. Trump\u2014despite his visceral resistance to the establishment ass<\/a>-covering and standard-issue foreign policy expertise that had pulled the country into hopeless wars\u2014was putty. After seeing all the horrifying photos he immediately adopted a completely conventional point of view: it seemed inconceivable to him that we could not do something.\u201d North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the \u201cNuclear Button is on his desk at all times.\u201d Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!<\/p>\n January 3, 2018 As well as painting the President as \u201clike a child\u201d, Fire and Fury also contains anecdotes that suggest those around him are concerned about his mental capacity to hold office.<\/p>\n \u2033[Trump\u2019s staffers were]\u00a0concerned that Trump\u2019s rambling and his alarming repetitions (the same sentences delivered with the same expressions minutes apart) had significantly increased, and that his ability to stay focused, never great, had notably declined…\u201d \u201cHe had a long-time fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald\u2019s\u2014nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely pre-made.\u201d As concerns grow for President Trump\u2019s mental fitness to govern, could the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution be used to force him from office? pic.twitter.com\/fQnbwOuL7t<\/a><\/p>\n January 5, 2018 Trump has repeatedly railed against \u201cleakers\u201d in the White House and intelligence services but so far as is known, he is yet to identify them.<\/p>\n Two passages, one from the book and a second from a column Wolff wrote for The Hollywood Reporter this week, suggest there may be a simple reason for this.<\/p>\n \u201cIf he was not having his six-thirty dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls<\/a> – the phone was his one true contact point with the world – to a small group of friends, among them most frequently Tom Barrack, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA chronic naysayer, Trump himself stoked constant discord with his daily after-dinner phone calls<\/a> to his billionaire friends about the disloyalty and incompetence around him. His billionaire friends then shared this with their billionaire friends, creating the endless leaks which the president so furiously railed against.\u201d Former White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, became somewhat of a legend for his astoundingly inept and increasingly fanciful press conferences\u00a0before resigning at the end of last summer.<\/p>\n Wolff, describing the inauguration crowd size incident which set the tone for the Trump presidency, suggests he was far from fully committed to the words he said on an almost daily basis:<\/p>\n \u2033… within 24 hours of the inauguration, the President had invented a million or so people who did not exist. He sent his new press secretary, Sean Spicer – whose personal mantra would soon become \u2018you can\u2019t make this shit up\u2019 – to argue to argue his case in a media moment that turned Spicer, quite a buttoned-down political professional, into a national joke, which he seemed never to recover from. To boot, the President blamed Spicer for not making the million phantom souls real.\u201d For what it\u2019s worth, Sanders has said of the book: \u201cThis is a guy<\/a> who made up a lot of stories to try to sell books, and I think more and more people are starting to see that his facts just simply don\u2019t add up.\u201d 7 Questions We Have After Reading ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House’ Perhaps inevitably, Michael Wolff\u2019s eagerly-anticipated account of life inside Donald Trump\u2019s administration has become an instant bestseller, with it\u2019s depiction of a \u201cdumb as shit\u201d President bumbling his way from one scarcely believable gaffe to the next. \u2018Fire and Fury: Inside … Continue reading 7 Questions We Have After Reading ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House’<\/span>
\nThere\u2019s also another element to the President\u2019s reaction, namely his legal team\u2019s assertion that Steve Bannon violated a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) by speaking with Wolff for the book.
\nTrump verified Bannon’s revelations and is too stupid to realize it. In order for Bannon to break his NDA, what he said about Trump has to be true. You can’t “disclose” something that never actually happened. #TrumpStupidity<\/p>\n
\nTrump Response To Bannon Calling Them Treasonous: 1) Bannon had no access and knew nothing in our administration so this is all false. 2) Bannon had so much access and knew so much stuff that we made him sign and NDA not to talk about it. Hmm. t.co\/GhXFRnHS7W<\/a><\/p>\n
\nIn short, according to the book, the law.<\/p>\n
\nThis chimes with revelations in the book disclosed by the Guardian earlier this week, in which Bannon is said to have described the now-infamous 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Trump aides and a group of Russians as \u201ctreasonous\u201d and \u201cunpatriotic\u201d.<\/p>\n
\n3) WHAT\u2019S THE DEAL WITH MELANIA?<\/p>\n
\nMelania\u2019s Communications Director, Stephanie Grisham, said on Friday: \u201cThe book is a work of fiction. It is a long-form tabloid that peddles false statements and total fabrications about Mrs Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n4) IS TRUMP GOING TO ANNIHILATE THE ENTIRE WORLD WITH HIS \u2018NUCLEAR BUTTON\u2019?<\/p>\n
\nSecondly, Trump\u2019s impulsiveness is laid bare with a story of how he is supposed to have come to his controversial decision to ban transgender people from serving in the military:<\/p>\n
\nTaken together it makes outbursts such as this all the more worrying.<\/p>\n
\n5) IS TRUMP DETERIORATING MENTALLY?<\/p>\n
\nParanoia is also a running theme of the book.<\/p>\n
\nAgain, even if the lines of the book are proven untrue, Trump\u2019s fitness for office was already being questioned and these latest revelations will do nothing to prove otherwise.<\/p>\n
\n6) IS THE \u2018LEAKER\u2019 TRUMP HAS BEEN HUNTING FOR MONTHS… ACTUALLY TRUMP?<\/p>\n
\n7) DID SEAN SPICER BELIEVE ANYTHING HE SAID?<\/p>\n
\nOf course this begs the question – does Trump\u2019s current Press Secretary, Sarah Sanders, believe what she\u2019s saying?<\/p>\n
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\nwww.huffingtonpost.co.uk\/entry\/fire-and-fury-review_uk_5a4fbb81e4b01e1a4b14e0e0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"