Manufacturing a Madman
From the print edition of The New American
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2018, 336 pages, hardcover.
According to Michael Wolff’s new best-seller, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Donald Trump did not think he would win the election — but that’s okay, because neither did anyone else in his inner circle. In fact, Melania hoped he would not win. He promised her he would not. When he did accidentally win, he was shocked, even upset. He only ran in an effort to build up the value of his brand and make himself the most famous man in the world — “a martyr to crooked Hillary” who fought against impossible odds only to have the election stolen from him. His behavior is so bizarre that his inner circle is in a constant state of incredulity. He is paranoid and afraid of being poisoned. He is illiterate. He was unable to have the Constitution explained to him and is ignorant of politics and the key players involved. He is insane. He is unfit for office.
The first thing an attentive reader notices about Fire and Fury (besides the cover, which looks like something a fourth-grader would mock up in an introductory Photoshop class) is that the book is filled to overflowing with he-said-she-said, over-the-top, salacious, scathing gossip that Wolff claims he uncovered as a result of “more than two hundred interviews” that he doggedly conducted “over a period of eighteen months.” The biggest problem with that is that Wolff — claiming to have spent all that time and effort collecting gossip — dumps it all on the reader without anything resembling a journalist’s skill for fact-checking. The reader is left to sort through it all and decide what to believe — which puts the reader in the exact same spot Wolff claims for himself in the “Author’s Note,” where he writes:
JBS Member or ShopJBS.org Customer?
Sign in with your ShopJBS.org account username and password or use that login to subscribe.
Subscribe Now
- 24 Issues Per Year
- Digital Edition Access
- Exclusive Subscriber Content
- Audio provided for all articles
- Unlimited access to past issues
- Cancel anytime.
- Renews automatically
Subscribe Now
- 24 Issues Per Year
- Print edition delivery (USA)
*Available Outside USA - Digital Edition Access
- Exclusive Subscriber Content
- Audio provided for all articles
- Unlimited access to past issues
- Cancel anytime.
- Renews automatically