OPINION:
Only a Never Trumper or a reflexive Trump-bashing Democrat is happy with the hellstorm that broke on Wednesday with the publication of excerpts from “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
This extraordinary book besmirches the character of everyone from President Trump, to his children and his top aides. Its author is Michael Wolff, a chronicler of sometimes sketchy credibility to whom Mr. Trump and Steve Bannon inexplicably gave the run of the White House from January through October.
Mr. Wolff portrays Mr. Trump as insecure yet egocentric, semiliterate, ignorant generally and worst of all, ignorant in particular of who John Boehner is when Roger Ailes suggests the tear-prone former House speaker would make a good chief of staff for Mr. Trump. Never mind that Mr. Trump and the former House speaker were golfing buds.
Mr. Wolff claims Mr. Trump and those around him planned on and, yes, counted on his losing to Hillary Clinton and using his enhanced notoriety to establish his own TV network. So he ran to increase his visibility. Really? Didn’t he have a leg up on all 16 of his GOP nomination rivals precisely because he was already a household name, thanks to his popular reality TV show that ran for 15 seasons on NBC?
Somehow, Mr. Bannon, unarguably holding the firmest worldview of Mr. Trump’s senior White House advisers, comes off as the book’s most important character after Mr. Trump himself — at least that’s the impression I get from the excerpts published so far.
The book won’t be available to us civilians until Jan. 9.
Ever since Mr. Trump fired him on Aug. 18, the selectively rumpled Mr. Bannon has been a disloyal loyalist of his former boss — a contradictory state not all that unusual for people and things associated with the Trump presidency. Mr. Bannon has said he will be steadfast to Mr. Trump. Mr. Bannon, nonetheless, has said Mr. Trump has only a 30 percent chance of winning re-election. Can’t blame Mr. Trump for thinking Fido has more fidelity.
It’s deliciously gossipy
Mr. Wolff quotes Mr. Bannon as saying it was “treasonous” for Donald Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and campaign chairman Paul Manafort to meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower in June 2016.
“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers,” Mr. Wolff quotes Mr. Bannon as saying. “Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad sh—, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
Treason punishable by death to meet with a female Russian lawyer who has ties to bigwigs in Moscow? Whatever Mr. Bannon is smoking, it isn’t Marlboro.
Visiting the sin of the son on the father, Mr. Bannon also incriminates the president in that June meeting: “The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos [drunks] up to his father’s office on the 26th floor is zero.”
What’s that all about, Steve? When did you decide to be a witness for the prosecution?
According to Mr. Wolff, Mr. Trump from his White House bedroom would call friends and acquaintances to disparage staff and family: “Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like sh—). [Reince] Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short — a midget). [Jared] Kushner was a suck-up. Sean Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). [Kellyanne] Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka [Trump] should never have come to Washington.” Wow! I’m stunned. Stunned I tell you.
Taking half a deep breath, Mr. Trump lashed back on Wednesday with the choice of words I at least have come to expect and — guilty me — like to hear coming from a leader.
“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency,” the president growled. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”
Ouch!
In a statement the White House released under his name, Mr. Trump continued to punch away.
“Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.”
It was no less a feat that he actually defeated 16 GOP nomination rivals, not 17 — but then precision is not the Trump White house’s most important product. Understanding the movement in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere toward unabashedly taking pride in, well, national pride and in the desire to put one’s own country, customs and mores first. It is the opposite of the one-world goal of the globalists both Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon disparage.
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