Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

by Michael Wolff

The business council was hemorrhaging its CEO members after the president’s Charlottesville news conference, and Trump, in a tweet, had announced that he was disbanding it. (Schwarzman had advised the president that the council was collapsing and that the president ought to at least make it look as if shutting it down was his decision.)

During the transition, Miller had been slated to be the communications director, but then it had come out that Miller had had a relationship with another staff member who announced in a tweet she was pregnant by Miller—as was also, at this point, Miller’s wife. Miller, who had lost his promised White House job but continued serving as an outside Trump and Bannon voice, was now, with the recent birth of the child—with the recent births of both of his children by different women—facing another wave of difficult press.

“That building,” said his friend David Bossie, speaking about all White Houses but especially the Trump White House, “takes perfectly healthy people and turns them into old, unhealthy people.”

After all, McConnell and the president were barely on speaking terms. From his August “working holiday” in Bedminster, the president’s staff had tried to organize a makeup meeting with McConnell, but McConnell’s staff had sent back word that it wouldn’t be possible because the Senate leader would be getting a haircut.

For Bannon, this episode was not only about the president’s continuing and curious confusion about what he represented, but about his mercurial, intemperate, and often cockamamie motivations. Against all political logic, Trump had supported Luther Strange, he told Bannon, because “Luther’s my friend.” “He said it like a nine-year-old,” said Bannon, recoiling, and noting that there was no universe in which Trump and Strange were actually friends.

“The president fundamentally wants to be liked” was Katie Walsh’s analysis. “He just fundamentally needs to be liked so badly that it’s always … everything is a struggle for him.”

The fundamental premise of nearly everybody who joined the Trump White House was, This can work. We can help make this work. Now, only three-quarters of the way through just the first year of Trump’s term, there was literally not one member of the senior staff who could any longer be confident of that premise.

In early October, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s fate was sealed—if his obvious ambivalence toward the president had not already sealed it—by the revelation that he had called the president “a fucking moron.”

Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn’t know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes. There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what. For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, he was an “idiot.” For Gary Cohn, he was “dumb as shit.” For H. R. McMaster he was a “dope.” The list went on.

Kelly’s distaste for the president was open knowledge—in his every word and gesture he condescended to Trump—the president’s distaste for Kelly even more so. It was sport for the president to defy Kelly, who had become the one thing in his life he had never been able to abide: a disapproving and censorious father figure.

But, of course, this was still politics: those who could overcome shame or disbelief—and, despite all Trumpian coarseness and absurdity, suck up to him and humor him—might achieve unique political advantage. As it happened, few could.

Now, nine months in, the administration faced the additional problem that it was very hard to hire anyone of stature to replace the senior people who had departed. And the stature of those who remained seemed to be more diminutive by the week.

Miller—who Bannon referred to as “my typist”—was a figure of ever increasing incredulity. He could hardly be taken out in public without engaging in some screwball, if not screeching, fit of denunciation and grievance. He was the de facto crafter of policy and speeches, and yet up until now he had largely only taken dictation.

Donald Trump has defied gravity, and everyone else is shackled to the ground. Donald Trump is a fabulist and a liar, and his journalist opponents believe themselves, in opposition, to be truth tellers, schoolmarmishly so. Fire and fury versus pursed-lip virtue.

The most obvious man on earth is yet, to the media, always astonishing. Whose fault is that? Covering a train wreck requires different skills from covering politics. But political reporters continue to apply the hyperrationality of political life and its heightened sense of cause and effect to Trump and his White House.

By insisting that Trump merely refuses to conform or doesn’t care to conform, the media misses the far more novel and alarming point: that he can’t conform.

In Washington a small number of news organizations (ever fewer as the media constricts), each competing with the other but all, lemming-like, mindful of the parameters of the game, dominate the form and sensibility of political coverage. While we see this as “journalism”—often with the criticism that it’s weighted to liberal journalism—we might as much see it as another kind of bureaucracy, weighted to protecting its own interests.

Journalists today are researchers, investigators, forensic specialists, data accountants, policy wonks, issue advocates, digital entrepreneurs, ambitious news executives, would-be politicians themselves, and media superstars, but they are not writers—language dies in their hands.

Understanding Donald Trump, how this happened, what he means, and what he is, will be the intellectual and creative battleground of the next generation.

Against this, I’ve offered a portrait of something more like anarchy, something actually quite comic, if it weren’t so repellent and frightening. A White House without purpose or abilities, not just incompetent but incoherent in thought and utterance, a place where everyone in it is openly contemptuous of it, more fearful perhaps for their own careers than the country, but—with more selflessness than you might expect to find—pretty fearful on the country’s behalf, too.