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Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
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Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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#1 New York Times Bestseller

With extraordinary access to the West Wing, Michael Wolff reveals what happened behind-the-scenes in the first nine months of the most controversial presidency of our time in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

Since Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, the country—and the world—has witnessed a stormy, outrageous, and absolutely mesmerizing presidential term that reflects the volatility and fierceness of the man elected Commander-in-Chief.

This riveting and explosive account of Trump’s administration provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office, including:
-- What President Trump’s staff really thinks of him
-- What inspired Trump to claim he was wire-tapped by President Obama
-- Why FBI director James Comey was really fired
-- Why chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner couldn’t be in the same room
-- Who is really directing the Trump administration’s strategy in the wake of Bannon’s firing
-- What the secret to communicating with Trump is
-- What the Trump administration has in common with the movie The Producers

Never before in history has a presidency so divided the American people. Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.

“Essential reading.”—Michael D’Antonio, author of Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success, CNN.com

“Not since Harry Potter has a new book caught fire in this way…[Fire and Fury] is indeed a significant achievement, which deserves much of the attention it has received.”The Economist

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 5, 2018
ISBN9781250158079
Author

Michael Wolff

Michael Wolff has been a regular columnist for Vanity Fair, New York, The Hollywood Reporter, British GQ, USA Today, and The Guardian. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Siege: Trump Under Fire, and six prior books, including the bestselling Burn Rate and The Man Who Owns the News. He has received numerous awards for his work, including two National Magazine Awards. He lives in New York City.

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Rating: 3.3882352190849674 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I had expected more of a hatchet job, but this was a more balanced report that held no surprises.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Michael Wolff spent months inside the Trump White House, often hanging out on the couch in a common area, talking to people, but also simply listening.

    It's important to note that Wolff has a reputation of being a somewhat sloppy reporter, not always reliable. It's also important, though, to note that no one mentioned in this book has denied saying what he attributes to them in this book. There are disagreements over interpretation, but not over what they said. Other reporters, with better reputations, as well as other people with access, say that while there may be inaccuracies of detail, the overall account rings true.

    Steve Bannon, now out of the White House, and indeed having further torched his standing with his failed support of Roy Moore's campaign for the US Senate in Alabama, was his main point of entry to the White House and apparently his major source. That's a possible source of bias in the gloss that gets put on the facts.

    Overall, this is an alarming picture of a White House in chaos. It's fascinating, revealing, and scary. It needs to be taken with a few grains of salt, and compared with other accounts and reporting as they become available. Nevertheless, it's an important contribution to understanding what is going on in our government and why.

    Recommended.

    I bought this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Was impressed with the intellectual rigor and overall writing of Michael Wolff's book. His personal appearances on TV belied the seriousness he brought to his book. Personally intrigued by the dynamic of Murdoch vs. Ailes and how much the President craved the approval of Murdoch. As an ardent watcher of the Presidency and the daily chaos of the White House, this book shed light on the personal habits of the President that you see playing out in real time, to this day. His reliance on his nightly phone calls with a coterie of "friends" , his total obsession with all things Trump and Bannon's relationship with the President, Reince Priebus etc. all made for a very interesting read and worth the hype surrounding the release of the book. .
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    As a daily consumer of politically oriented news from across the media spectrum, the much publicized 'Fire and Fury' was kind of a yawn to me. Lots of anecdotes, speculation, and commentary, but pretty light on direct quotes and what anyone would construe as true 'reporting'. The writing is very basic and the whole thing reads like a very long HuffPost article.That's not to say it's lacking in tidbits about people you hear about (or have heard about in the past, considering the turnover in the WH) a lot. Surprisingly, Steve Bannon comes across as one of the more talkative players Wolff dealt with during his time wandering the White House hallways. He's still a bad guy, but pretty funny in a way and surprisingly pithy with comments about the others surrounding Trump. If you're a Trump supporter, chances are you'll not even pick up this book. For anyone else who's interested in what's going on with the Leader of the Free World, it's an interesting diversion that'll probably give you some background about situations and people that have been in the news.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Fire and Fury starts out as a gossipy exposé of the first several months of the Trump administration. The book's portrayal of Donald Trump as an apathetic candidate (who actually was banking on not winning the election) and even less engaged president surrounded by sycophants is remarkable and frightening at the same time. As the book goes on, however, it becomes more and more of a slog. I'm not sure if the problem is the writing style, the subject matter, or both. I lost interest at about the halfway point and had a hard time making myself go on.With the possible exception of wife-in-name-only Melania Trump, there are no sympathetic characters in this book. But, it may be helpful to those who seek to understand the current chaos in the White House.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Pulpy. You kinda feel soiled after reading it. Should've had a subtitle: "Bannon uses Michael Wolff as a ventriloquist dummy."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House promises from the beginning to offer a fly-on-the-wall view of the way things work (or don't) inside the Trump Administration. Early in his account, Wolff describes the campaign as resembling Mel Brooks' The Producers (pgs. 15-16) and this characterization, coupled with the political infighting of Game of Thrones, dominates the feel of the book from then on. Steve Bannon emerges as the "protagonist" (if there is one) as much of the story revolves around his work to brand Trump's particular style of politics and turn it into a movement or his work to assert himself as the power-behind-the-power in the White House. The end result is a narrative that leaves one feeling somewhat dirty or complicit for this inside look.While Wolff's account feels true, and he had libel lawyers read the manuscript to make sure it was safe to publish, I would have liked to see the extensive notes section one expects in a book from a journalist. He only mentions early on that he either witnessed many of these events or was told them by people who are given away in his account. Some kind of documentation would have been preferable, even if it meant a lot of interviews not for attribution listed at the end. Also, for anyone who's been following the news these last few months, most of this information is already out there. Indeed, Wolff regularly quotes from CNN or New York Times headlines. Further, the news coverage of this book was so extensive that most people who read it will find exactly what they expect based on that coverage.If you are interested in politics or current events, give it a read, but save yourself the money and get it from the library.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    After reading this book I found that I have a lot less interest in Trump and his White House staff than I even thought I did. I don't understand anything any better having read this book. Everything that was laid out in this book was exactly as I thought it to be. An uneducated Trump to the point of illiteracy that didn't expect to win suddenly finds himself president of the United States surrounded by sycophants and people pushing their own agenda. I didn't find any startling revelations. I get more out of episode of John Oliver or Bill Maher. If you are looking for a book to better understand Trump this is not it. If you have read it congratulations, you are more well read than our leader.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm shocked at how little new information this unveiled. Everything was either "well, duh" obvious, or all over the news at some point. I was hoping for some secrets being unearthed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Reading this from across the Pond, I don't know much about American politics, and had to keep googling the various personnel appearing in these pages. So its to Michael Wolff's credit that I found this a fast-paced, fascinating, gossipy insight into the angry chaos inside Trump's Whitehouse.Read like a far-fetched roller-coaster cynical political t.v. Soap-opera. Scarily it seems a lot of it is true.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff follows the unlikely campaign of 45 through the first 9 months of his time at the White House.I found the biggest problem with this book is the lack of editing, especially in the first half. There is too much purple prose and sentences that run off on tangents. It's easy to lose the point of a sentence when it runs on for a paragraph and constantly twists off the main thread.That said, I did appreciate Wolff's assessment of this administration and his account is very believable. Everything in the book is familiar to anyone who has followed the news, but the author gives more information about what was happening behind the scenes.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I was surprised to find in reading "Fire and Fury" - Michael Wolff's seventh book (I haven't read any of his others), that it was not the lurid secrets revealed that intrigued me most (they were old news by the time I got my back-ordered copy) nor the "behind the scenes" descriptions of "what really goes on in the White House" that I found to be the most remarkable element of the book, but rather it was the unusual run-on sentences with thoughts streaming in out of the blue, accompanied by a higher density by far of punctuation marks per word per page than other books I was reading at the time, e.g. "Leonardo", by Walter Isaacson, so different that I thought I would write this review (posted on both Amazon and LibraryThing using a similar style throughout to give you an idea of what you will frequently encounter should you decide to read it. Of course, I could just reproduce a sentence or two, and in fact, I do that in the paragraph immediately below, but a few sentences, standing alone in a rather twisted weave, does not convey the same effect as a books-worth, and if you doubt my words, you may wish to stop at a bookstore and leaf through some random pages, or even easier, go to Amazon's review page and take a look at some of the "Look Inside" material.Here's Wolff, beginning page 161, bottom paragraph: For Breitbart, the House rebellion and transformation that had driven the former Speaker, John Boehner, from office, and which, plausibly, was set to remake the House into the center of the new radical Republicanism had been halted by Ryan's selection as Speaker. Mitt Romney's running mate, and a figure who had merged a conservative fiscal wonkishness - he had been chairman of the House Ways and Means committee -with an old-fashioned idea of unassailable Republican rectitude, Ryan was the official last, best hope of the Republican Party. (Bannon, typically, had turned this trope into an official Trumpist talking point: "Ryan was created in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.")(Want more? try bottom of page 144 and just continue until....)Too often, I had to stop and go back to re-read, searching for the elusive main thought that had somehow escaped me, and coming away feeling I was reading a first draft, something rushed to take advantage of a marketing window (though whether that was the case or not I had no idea), and while this became the main negative of this book for me, it was not alone. I'm certainly no prude and have no issues with salty language when used in appropriate circumstances, but I thought it was overdone here; I certainly have no illusions about the level of language used in almost all organizations including the White House and a few examples make the point, but I thought it was a bit overdone(and the author even feels it necessary to clarify "repetitions" as it applies to Trump's speaking skills or lack thereof), and speaking of overdone I wondered why Wolff found it necessary to make 4 uses of "Catholic" between pages 55 and 57 in describing Bannon's background; I found that rather strange and a bit overdone.There were some positives, little things mostly like the juicy bits about the Hicks-Lewandowski relationship and Bannon's (and apparently Wolff's) not too flattering assessment of Hope Hicks's abilities and then there's the frequent negative shots at Ivanka, and now I can stop having nightmares about her ever becoming POTUS, but then that was exactly the same I thought of her father two years ago.....OMG! There was an especially funny line I hadn't heard before spoken by our President, per page 98, bottom: "They take everything I've ever said and exaggerate it," said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. "It's all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated." Nikki Haley is compared to X in terms of her ambitions, and it's a hilarious comment - you'll have to read the book to find it (hint pg 309). And I thought the descriptions of the first weeks in the White House were very interesting. Not a lot that was new, but confirming my worst imaginings, somehow reading it as it actually happened was more unnerving than I thought it would be and I thought Wolff did a good job of describing the chaos that ruled and the sheer amateurism that prevailed. So, would I recommend this book?.....you have to ask....absolutely not, I even feel my 3 star rating is overly generous and would I read a follow on book?, hell yes and don't ask me to explain why.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    For starters, the ubiquitous promotional campaign that preceded the release of ths book should be a lesson to other authors. If you're going to serve up three-quarters of all the riveting material in media interviews, be prepared for many readers to a tad disappointed as they search for uncharted territory during their 300+-page adventures. Having said that, Wolff's controversial work is a fascinating and disturbing protrait of a White House in disarray. True, some inaccuracies, inconsistencies and other issues have raised come credibility questions. But political junkies and even armchair contemporary history buffs will find this an interesting "fly-on-the-wall" perspective one of the most tumultous periods in Washington history. It raises some intriguing questions and provides insights into dozens of key players both inside and outside the White House.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I had read the excerpts, which were a bit tabloid-like, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. As one reviewer said, it read like a thriller, but was also quite well-researched - like a good journalistic piece. I kept thinking it was written by Steve Bannon though! It was like being a fly on the wall in his office.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I borrowed Fire and Fury from the library and read only five chapters over the three weeks I had it. I was looking for something more substantial and factual but this felt more like one long “Psst! Hey, so and so told me...” I’m not saying that there is no truth to the book but it felt to me like watching a reality show and I really dislike reality shows. Yes, I realize this is where we are as a country lately but I want something a little different from my reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    5540. Fire and Fury Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff (read 6 Mar 2018) When I put my name in at the Library for this book I was number 22, but there was more than one copy and I soon had the book--though it was due in one week instead of the usual three. The book has no footnotes, no source notes, and of course no bibliography. I recognize that it is the type of book where some sources will not be wiling to be identified, but there are some things in the book which could have been and I wish had been sourced. It is a pretty startling book although I cannot say anything in the book surprised me since we have been listening to and watching the current president for many months now. The book tells much about Steve Bannon, apparently a source for much in the book.. On page 309 in the book it is stated: that Steve Bannon says he himself will run for president in 2020, and will be elected. My first reaction was he could never be elected and then, with a shudder, I recalled that I thought the same thing in regard to Donald Trump in 2015. One should take care not to underestimate the stupidity of the electorate, I remind myself.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Entertaining yet lacks credibility. Its sources and their veracity were dubious at best and some facts misleading. However, it is fast paced and gives more dimension and background to the behind the scenes characters of the current administration. But even if only a fraction were accurate it’s still eye opening and renders the dysfunction as entertaining.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Because I have been all too absorbed in the daily happenings, the overall story of this book in terms of what happened when is something you can easily agree with. What was more interesting was the flavor Wolff provides about what people right IN there with "T" were saying and feeling at the time. Just a mind-boggling mess---I really wish it WERE just a novel. This is one of those cases where truth, or at least what is presented by Wolff, is much, MUCH stranger than fiction---sadly.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I couldn't resist, everyone was talking about it so I had to read it. No surprises here. The book really is about a war between two factions in the WH. Javanca (Bannon's description of Ivana and Jared) vs Bannon's team (Bannon, Preibus and Spicer) with trump the piece in the middle which both camps push and pull as they please. Lots of edit errors (spellings, grammar, etc), which makes one wonder how many facts were confused too. But don't look at the details but rather the overall picture which is pretty gloomy. I was hoping the end would tell us how we got rid of them all, but unfortunately it doesn't :)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Poorly written and edited, more than a little trashy, and sometimes of questionable trustworthiness. Yet, this book confirms a lot of what many of us imagine is going on in the White House. Honestly, I found the most horrifying details to be the ones that were verifiable. For example, the president's first speech to the CIA--read the transcript of that bizarre monologue and it's easy to imagine that he's just as idiotic in private conversations. I admit and acknowledge that I'm reading and reviewing Fire and Fury with a massive bias, so take my comments with a grain of salt.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I plead guilty to buying this because of all the hype. I have only read one other political book (by Elizabeth Warren) so I have no basis of comparison to other writers. I found it quite difficult to follow. It seemed that way to many sentences followed the form, Joe Blow, former chief of something, did such and such. I found myself having the reread the sentence skipping the intro part.What I did gather was a picture of a totally maladjusted group of people running our country. I long for a Jed Bartlett figure. Obama was, if nothing else, well spoken. He showed off his education without bragging about it. At one point, I was reading about Scaramucci. He insinuated himself into the staff. He would pop into random meetings without invitation, sit down and participate like he belonged there. It was totally surreal that as I was reading about him, he came up on the TV at the economic summit in Switzerland. It was a slog but I persevered and got through it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book received a great deal of hype. Too often such hype is way out of proportion to the actual book. However, here the hype was on target. This is a frightening look at the Trump White House, even if some of it proves to be discredited. What makes so much of it believable is that it aligns too often with what we as citizens and voters can observe about the president and his staff with our own eyes! This is a man who should never have run for this office, much less be elected to it. He has brought out the worst in too many of us because that is who he is at his core. This book is a shocking look at a man who probably will go down in history as the worst president we ever elected to this vaulted position.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Another book that Trump fans will hate and one that has drummed up lots of controversy. I didn't really learn anything new from this book, but it was a firly interesting listen.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Listened to this book on audio. Excellently revealing assessment of Trump personality (even though we all intuitively knew what he is like through his crazy behavior) and what's going on in the West Wing. Kudos to the Michael Wolff. The errors reported in the news are minute compared to the real insight of what's going in Trump White House. It's scary to realize that what seems like a nightmarish film is actually a reality. The narrator of the audio version, Holter Graham, did a superb job too.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I wouldn’t have purchased this book, except for the vitriol coming from #45 about this book. Nothing new is presented, but the tone it sets continues to prove that Trump’s White House is dysfunctional.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An account of the turmoil and in-fighting inside the White House during the first months to the Presidency of Donald J. Trump. The author doesn't reveal his sources. My guess is that the primary source was Steve Bannon. I found that it is easier to read the words of the author than it is to listen to him on television promoting his book. In the book his word syntax is often difficult to follow and he uses many words that aren't in my vocabulary. Lack of through proof reading is evident from the numerous typos in the book. Overall, I enjoyed reading the book and recommend it to anyone who is interested in gaining some understanding into why the White House fiascos are occuring on a daily basis.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I am going to go out on a limb here, and say that I dislike the book. It is racy, no doubt. It is also saucy, and if it were to be believed, the language that people in the White House use, is fairly bad - and they refer to people in a rather disrespectful manner. The book reads like a thriller, going from one page to the next, without a pause. I don't see too much insight into this, except that Trump seems to be manipulating the White House to his own ends. How do Ivanka and his son-in-law get such positions of power? This is nepotism.There is a bewildering array of characters in the cast, and this makes no sense to anyone who is not American, or follows American politics closely. So, not a good book at all. It seems to be selling well, so more power to him!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Perhaps a mix of fiction, fact, and hearsay, this exposé nonetheless raises serious questions about the inner workings of the Trump Administration and about Trump's abilities and ethics. Scary stuff if even one third of it is factual.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Why five stars, because I found this book fascinating in many ways. Sure, there are all those bizarre quotes and "related comments" that we all know from the news and the heavy media coverage of this bestseller, but the form of the book is a trip. The structure is somewhat chronological, somewhat by topic, but page by page it's scattershot, dancing all over the Trump White House. I kept having a strong image of the author just sitting on a couch in a well-trafficked area of the White House and the entire staff dropping themselves down and spilling their guts ... be it factual, rumor, or pure political intrigue. Oh no, this rating of five stars isn't for fine writing, but the style seems open to anything, and not held to many set rules. My mind heard so much familiar - as I am a political news junkie - but it's almost overwhelming to have it all together, page after page after page after page. Unprecedented is the best label for our political times and this jumbled, stuffed-to-the-gills work of nonfiction aptly reflects how people listening to Trump news feel themselves overloaded, and the sheer volume and speed of all that reporting causing all of us to age so quickly. Hasn't Cheetos Trump been president for at least four years yet???????
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    No shortage of dirt about President Donald Trump and his White House. Follows the story from inauguration until Bannon's dismissal. Cable News has highlighted the most outrageous claims while making clear that there are errors while noting that if even a generous proportion of claims are true, the result is a hair-raising view of a man who should not even be allowed to take the White House tour. Any flaws in the book, including the occasional over-complex sentence, are overwhelmed by the content. Amazing story.

Book preview

Fire and Fury - Michael Wolff

PROLOGUE

Ailes and Bannon

The evening began at six-thirty, but Steve Bannon, suddenly among the world’s most powerful men and now less and less mindful of time constraints, was late.

Bannon had promised to come to this small dinner arranged by mutual friends in a Greenwich Village town house to see Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News and the most significant figure in right-wing media and Bannon’s sometime mentor. The next day, January 4, 2017—little more than two weeks before the inauguration of his friend Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president—Ailes would be heading to Palm Beach, into a forced, but he hoped temporary, retirement.

Snow was threatening, and for a while the dinner appeared doubtful. The seventy-six-year-old Ailes, with a long history of leg and hip problems, was barely walking, and, coming in to Manhattan with his wife Beth from their upstate home on the Hudson, was wary of slippery streets. But Ailes was eager to see Bannon. Bannon’s aide, Alexandra Preate, kept texting steady updates on Bannon’s progress extracting himself from Trump Tower.

As the small group waited for Bannon, it was Ailes’s evening. Quite as dumbfounded by his old friend Donald Trump’s victory as most everyone else, Ailes provided the gathering with something of a mini-seminar on the randomness and absurdities of politics. Before launching Fox News in 1996, Ailes had been, for thirty years, among the leading political operatives in the Republican Party. As surprised as he was by this election, he could yet make a case for a straight line from Nixon to Trump. He just wasn’t sure, he said, that Trump himself, at various times a Republican, Independent, and Democrat, could make the case. Still, he thought he knew Trump as well as anyone did and was eager to offer his help. He was also eager to get back into the right-wing media game, and he energetically described some of the possibilities for coming up with the billion or so dollars he thought he would need for a new cable network.

Both men, Ailes and Bannon, fancied themselves particular students of history, both autodidacts partial to universal field theories. They saw this in a charismatic sense—they had a personal relationship with history, as well as with Donald Trump.

Now, however reluctantly, Ailes understood that, at least for the moment, he was passing the right-wing torch to Bannon. It was a torch that burned bright with ironies. Ailes’s Fox News, with its $1.5 billion in annual profits, had dominated Republican politics for two decades. Now Bannon’s Breitbart News, with its mere $1.5 million in annual profits, was claiming that role. For thirty years, Ailes—until recently the single most powerful person in conservative politics—had humored and tolerated Donald Trump, but in the end Bannon and Breitbart had elected him.

Six months before, when a Trump victory still seemed out of the realm of the possible, Ailes, accused of sexual harassment, was cashiered from Fox News in a move engineered by the liberal sons of conservative eighty-five-year-old Rupert Murdoch, the controlling shareholder of Fox News and the most powerful media owner of the age. Ailes’s downfall was cause for much liberal celebration: the greatest conservative bugbear in modern politics had been felled by the new social norm. Then Trump, hardly three months later, accused of vastly more louche and abusive behavior, was elected president.


Ailes enjoyed many things about Trump: his salesmanship, his showmanship, his gossip. He admired Trump’s sixth sense for the public marketplace—or at least the relentlessness and indefatigability of his ceaseless attempts to win it over. He liked Trump’s game. He liked Trump’s impact and his shamelessness. He just keeps going, Ailes had marveled to a friend after the first debate with Hillary Clinton. You hit Donald along the head, and he keeps going. He doesn’t even know he’s been hit.

But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone. The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox’s angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world. The joke was on somebody—and Ailes thought it might be on him.

Still, Ailes had been observing politicians for decades, and in his long career he had witnessed just about every type and style and oddity and confection and cravenness and mania. Operatives like himself—and now, like Bannon—worked with all kinds. It was the ultimate symbiotic and codependent relationship. Politicians were front men in a complex organizational effort. Operatives knew the game, and so did most candidates and officeholders. But Ailes was pretty sure Trump did not. Trump was undisciplined—he had no capacity for any game plan. He could not be a part of any organization, nor was he likely to subscribe to any program or principle. In Ailes’s view, he was a rebel without a cause. He was simply Donald—as though nothing more need be said.

In early August, less than a month after Ailes had been ousted from Fox News, Trump asked his old friend to take over the management of his calamitous campaign. Ailes, knowing Trump’s disinclination to take advice, or even listen to it, turned him down. This was the job Bannon took a week later.

After Trump’s victory, Ailes seemed to balance regret that he had not seized the chance to run his friend’s campaign with incredulity that Trump’s offer had turned out to be the ultimate opportunity. Trump’s rise to power, Ailes understood, was the improbable triumph of many things that Ailes and Fox News represented. After all, Ailes was perhaps the person most responsible for unleashing the angry-man currents of Trump’s victory: he had invented the right-wing media that delighted in the Trump character.

Ailes, who was a member of the close circle of friends and advisers Trump frequently called, found himself hoping he would get more time with the new president once he and Beth moved to Palm Beach; he knew Trump planned to make regular trips to Mar-a-Lago, down the road from Ailes’s new home. Still, though Ailes was well aware that in politics winning changes everything—the winner is the winner—he couldn’t quite get his head around the improbable and bizarre fact that his friend Donald Trump was now president of the United States.


At nine-thirty, three hours late, a good part of the dinner already eaten, Bannon finally arrived. Wearing a disheveled blazer, his signature pairing of two shirts, and military fatigues, the unshaven, overweight sixty-three-year-old joined the other guests at the table and immediately took control of the conversation. Pushing a proffered glass of wine away—I don’t drink—he dived into a live commentary, an urgent download of information about the world he was about to take over.

We’re going to flood the zone so we have every cabinet member for the next seven days through their confirmation hearings, he said of the business-and-military 1950s-type cabinet choices. Tillerson is two days, Session is two days, Mattis is two days.…

Bannon veered from Mad Dog Mattis—the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominated as secretary of defense—to a long riff on torture, the surprising liberalism of generals, and the stupidity of the civilian-military bureaucracy. Then it was on to the looming appointment of Michael Flynn—a favorite Trump general who’d been the opening act at many Trump rallies—as the national security advisor.

He’s fine. He’s not Jim Mattis and he’s not John Kelly … but he’s fine. He just needs the right staff around him. Still, Bannon averred: When you take out all the never-Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars … it’s not a deep bench.

Bannon said he’d tried to push John Bolton, the famously hawkish diplomat, for the job as national security advisor. Bolton was an Ailes favorite, too.

He’s a bomb thrower, said Ailes. And a strange little fucker. But you need him. Who else is good on Israel? Flynn is a little nutty on Iran. Tillerson—the secretary of state designate—just knows oil.

Bolton’s mustache is a problem, snorted Bannon. Trump doesn’t think he looks the part. You know Bolton is an acquired taste.

Well, he got in trouble because he got in a fight in a hotel one night and chased some woman.

If I told Trump that, he might have the job.


Bannon was curiously able to embrace Trump while at the same time suggesting he did not take him entirely seriously. He had first met Trump, the on-again off-again presidential candidate, in 2010; at a meeting in Trump Tower, Bannon had proposed to Trump that he spend half a million dollars backing Tea Party–style candidates as a way to further his presidential ambitions. Bannon left the meeting figuring that Trump would never cough up that kind of dough. He just wasn’t a serious player. Between that first encounter and mid-August 2016, when he took over the Trump campaign, Bannon, beyond a few interviews he had done with Trump for his Breitbart radio show, was pretty sure he hadn’t spent more than ten minutes in one-on-one conversation with Trump.

But now Bannon’s zeitgeist moment had arrived. Everywhere there was a sudden sense of global self-doubt. Brexit in the UK, waves of immigrants arriving on Europe’s angry shores, the disenfranchisement of the workingman, the specter of more financial meltdown, Bernie Sanders and his liberal revanchism—everywhere was backlash. Even the most dedicated exponents of globalism were hesitating. Bannon believed that great numbers of people were suddenly receptive to a new message: the world needs borders—or the world should return to a time when it had borders. When America was great. Trump had become the platform for that message.

By that January evening, Bannon had been immersed in Donald Trump’s world for almost five months. And though he had accumulated a sizable catalogue of Trump’s peculiarities, and cause enough for possible alarm about the unpredictability of his boss and his views, that did not detract from Trump’s extraordinary, charismatic appeal to the right-wing, Tea Party, Internet meme base, and now, in victory, from the opportunity he was giving Steve Bannon.


"Does he get it?" asked Ailes suddenly, pausing and looking intently at Bannon.

He meant did Trump get it. This seemed to be a question about the right-wing agenda: Did the playboy billionaire really get the workingman populist cause? But it was possibly a point-blank question about the nature of power itself. Did Trump get where history had put him?

Bannon took a sip of water. He gets it, said Bannon, after hesitating for perhaps a beat too long. Or he gets what he gets.

With a sideways look, Ailes continued to stare him down, as though waiting for Bannon to show more of his cards.

Really, Bannon said. He’s on the program. It’s his program. Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. Day one we’re moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all in. Sheldon—Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, far-right Israel defender, and Trump supporter—is all in. We know where we’re heading on this.

Does Donald know? asked a skeptical Ailes.

Bannon smiled—as though almost with a wink—and continued:

Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared to death of Persia … Yemen, Sinai, Libya … this thing is bad.… That’s why Russia is so key.… Is Russia that bad? They’re bad guys. But the world is full of bad guys.

Bannon offered all this with something like ebullience—a man remaking the world.

But it’s good to know the bad guys are the bad guys, said Ailes, pushing Bannon. Donald may not know.

The real enemy, said an on-point Bannon, careful not to defend Trump too much or to dis him at all, was China. China was the first front in a new cold war. And it had all been misunderstood in the Obama years—what we thought we understood we didn’t understand at all. That was the failure of American intelligence. I think Comey is a third-rate guy. I think Brennan is a second-rate guy, Bannon said, dismissing the FBI director and the CIA director.

The White House right now is like Johnson’s White House in 1968. Susan Rice—Obama’s national security advisor—is running the campaign against ISIS as a national security advisor. They’re picking the targets, she’s picking the drone strikes. I mean, they’re running the war with just as much effectiveness as Johnson in sixty-eight. The Pentagon is totally disengaged from the whole thing. Intel services are disengaged from the whole thing. The media has let Obama off the hook. Take the ideology away from it, this is complete amateur hour. I don’t know what Obama does. Nobody on Capitol Hill knows him, no business guys know him—what has he accomplished, what does he do?

Where’s Donald on this? asked Ailes, now with the clear implication that Bannon was far out ahead of his benefactor.

He’s totally on board.

Focused?

He buys it.

I wouldn’t give Donald too much to think about, said an amused Ailes.

Bannon snorted. Too much, too little—doesn’t necessarily change things.


What has he gotten himself into with the Russians? pressed Ailes.

Mostly, said Bannon, he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet Putin. But Putin couldn’t give a shit about him. So he’s kept trying.

He’s Donald, said Ailes.

It’s a magnificent thing, said Bannon, who had taken to regarding Trump as something like a natural wonder, beyond explanation.

Again, as though setting the issue of Trump aside—merely a large and peculiar presence both to be thankful for and to have to abide—Bannon, in the role he had conceived for himself, the auteur of the Trump presidency, charged forward:

China’s everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we don’t get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You’re going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

Donald might not be Nixon in China, said Ailes, deadpan, suggesting that for Trump to seize the mantle of global transformation might strain credulity.

Bannon smiled. Bannon in China, he said, with both remarkable grandiosity and wry self-deprecation.

How’s the kid? asked Ailes, referring to Trump’s son-in-law and paramount political adviser, thirty-six-year-old Jared Kushner.

He’s my partner, said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message.

Really? said a dubious Ailes.

He’s on the team.

He’s had a lot of lunches with Rupert.

In fact, said Bannon, I could use your help here. Bannon then spent several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch. Ailes, since his ouster from Fox, had become only more bitter toward Murdoch. Now Murdoch was frequently jawboning the president-elect and encouraging him toward establishment moderation—all a strange inversion in the ever-stranger currents of American conservatism. Bannon wanted Ailes to suggest to Trump, a man whose many neuroses included a horror of forgetfulness or senility, that Murdoch might be losing it.

I’ll call him, said Ailes. But Trump would jump through hoops for Rupert. Like for Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about who’s jerking whose chain.

The older right-wing media wizard and the younger (though not by all that much) continued on to the other guests’ satisfaction until twelve-thirty, the older trying to see through to the new national enigma that was Trump—although Ailes would say that in fact Trump’s behavior was ever predictable—and the younger seemingly determined not to spoil his own moment of destiny.

Donald Trump has got it. He’s Trump, but he’s got it. Trump is Trump, affirmed Bannon.

Yeah, he’s Trump, said Ailes, with something like incredulity.

1

ELECTION DAY

On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway—Donald Trump’s campaign manager and a central, indeed starring, personality of Trumpworld—settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the Trump campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans.

Conway now was in a remarkably buoyant mood considering she was about to experience a resounding if not cataclysmic defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election—of this she was sure—but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under 6 points. That was a substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: it was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.

She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming Priebus. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors with whom she’d built strong relationships—and with whom, actively interviewing in the last few weeks, she was hoping to land a permanent on-air job after the election. She’d carefully courted many of them since joining the Trump campaign in mid-August and becoming the campaign’s reliably combative voice and, with her spasmodic smiles and strange combination of woundedness and imperturbability, peculiarly telegenic face.

Beyond all of the other horrible blunders of the campaign, the real problem, she said, was the devil they couldn’t control: the Republican National Committee, which was run by Priebus, his sidekick, thirty-two-year-old Katie Walsh, and their flack, Sean Spicer. Instead of being all in, the RNC, ultimately the tool of the Republican establishment, had been hedging its bets ever since Trump won the nomination in early summer. When Trump needed the push, the push just wasn’t there.

That was the first part of Conway’s spin. The other part was that, despite everything, the campaign had really clawed its way back from the abyss. A severely underresourced team with, practically speaking, the worst candidate in modern political history—Conway offered either an eye-rolling pantomime whenever Trump’s name was mentioned or a dead stare—had actually done extraordinarily well. Conway, who had never been involved in a national campaign, and who, before Trump, ran a small-time, down-ballot polling firm, understood full well that, post-campaign, she would now be one of the leading conservative voices on cable news.

In fact, one of the Trump campaign pollsters, John McLaughlin, had begun to suggest within the past week or so that some key state numbers, heretofore dismal, might actually be changing to Trump’s advantage. But neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law Jared Kushner—the effective head of the campaign, or the designated family monitor of it—wavered in their certainty: their unexpected adventure would soon be over.

Only Steve Bannon, in his odd-man view, insisted the numbers would break in their favor. But this being Bannon’s view—crazy Steve—it was quite the opposite of being a reassuring one.

Almost everybody in the campaign, still an extremely small outfit, thought of themselves as a clear-eyed team, as realistic about their prospects as perhaps any in politics. The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. He had survived the release of the Billy Bush tape when, in the uproar that followed, the RNC had had the gall to pressure him to quit the race. FBI director James Comey, having bizarrely hung Hillary out to dry by saying he was reopening the investigation into her emails eleven days before the election, had helped avert a total Clinton landslide.

I can be the most famous man in the world, Trump told his on-again, off-again aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the campaign.

But do you want to be president? Nunberg asked (a qualitatively different question than the usual existential candidate test: Why do you want to be president?). Nunberg did not get an answer.

The point was, there didn’t need to be an answer because he wasn’t going to be president.

Trump’s longtime friend Roger Ailes liked to say that if you wanted a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future.

He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities. This is bigger than I ever dreamed of, he told Ailes in a conversation a week before the election. I don’t think about losing because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won. What’s more, he was already laying down his public response to losing the election: It was stolen!

Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win.


In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can’t win unless you believe that you will win—except in the Trump campaign.

The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how everybody involved in it was a loser. He was equally convinced that the Clinton people were brilliant winners—They’ve got the best and we’ve got the worst, he frequently said. Time spent with Trump on the campaign plane was often an epic dissing experience: everybody around him was an idiot.

Corey Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s first more or less official campaign manager, was often berated by the candidate. For months Trump called him the worst, and in June 2016 he was finally fired. Ever after, Trump proclaimed his campaign doomed without Lewandowski. We’re all losers, he would say. All our guys are terrible, nobody knows what they’re doing.… Wish Corey was back. Trump quickly soured on his second campaign manager, Paul Manafort, as well.

By August, trailing Clinton by 12 to 17 points and facing a daily firestorm of eviscerating press, Trump couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. At this dire moment, Trump in some essential sense sold his losing campaign. The right-wing billionaire Bob Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer, had shifted his support to Trump with a $5 million infusion. Believing the campaign was cratering, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah took a helicopter from their Long Island estate out to a scheduled fundraiser—with other potential donors bailing by the second—at New York Jets owner and Johnson & Johnson heir Woody Johnson’s summer house in the Hamptons.

Trump had no real relationship with either father or daughter. He’d had only a few conversations with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables; Rebekah Mercer’s entire history with Trump consisted of a selfie taken with him at Trump Tower. But when the Mercers presented their plan to take over the campaign and install their lieutenants Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Trump didn’t resist. He only expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. This thing, he told the Mercers, is so fucked up.

By every meaningful indicator, something greater than even a sense of doom shadowed what Steve Bannon called the broke-dick campaign—a sense of structural impossibility.

The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire—ten times over—refused even to invest his own money in it. Bannon told Jared Kushner—who, when Bannon signed on to the campaign, had been off with his wife on a holiday in Croatia with Trump enemy David Geffen—that, after the first debate in September, they would need an additional $50 million to cover them until election day.

No way we’ll get fifty million unless we can guarantee him victory, said a clear-eyed Kushner.

Twenty-five million? prodded Bannon.

If we can say victory is more than likely.

In the end, the best Trump would do is loan the campaign $10 million, provided he got it back as soon as they could raise other money. (Steve Mnuchin, then the campaign’s finance chairman, came to collect the loan with the wire instructions ready to go, so Trump couldn’t conveniently forget to send the money.)

There was in fact no real campaign because there was no real organization, or at best only a uniquely dysfunctional one. Roger Stone, the early de facto campaign manager, quit or was fired by Trump—with each man publicly claiming he had slapped down the other. Sam Nunberg, a Trump aide who had worked for Stone, was noisily ousted by Lewandowski, and then Trump exponentially increased the public dirty-clothes-washing by suing Nunberg. Lewandowski and Hope Hicks, the PR aide put on the campaign by Ivanka Trump, had an affair that ended in a public fight on the street—an incident cited by Nunberg in his response to Trump’s suit. The campaign, on its face, was not designed to win anything.

Even as Trump eliminated the sixteen other Republican candidates, however far-fetched that might have seemed, it did not make the ultimate goal of winning the presidency any less preposterous.

And if, during the fall, winning seemed slightly more plausible, that evaporated with the Billy Bush affair. I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them, Trump told the NBC host Billy Bush on an open mic, amid the ongoing national debate about sexual harassment. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.… Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.

It was an operatic unraveling. So mortifying was this development that when Reince Priebus, the RNC head, was called to New York from Washington for an emergency meeting at Trump Tower, he couldn’t bring himself to leave Penn Station. It took two hours for the Trump team to coax him across town.

Bro, said a desperate Bannon, cajoling Priebus on the phone, I may never see you again after today, but you gotta come to this building and you gotta walk through the front door.


The silver lining of the ignominy Melania Trump had to endure after the Billy Bush tape was that now there was no way her husband could become president.

Donald Trump’s marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him—or it was, anyway, 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 much notice of that fact. Her husband moved between residences as he would move 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. Now on his third marriage, he told friends he thought he had finally perfected the art: live and let live—Do your own thing.

He was a notorious womanizer, and during the campaign became possibly the world’s most famous masher. While nobody would ever say Trump was sensitive when it came to women, he had many views about how to get along with them, including a theory he discussed with friends about how the more years between an older man and a younger woman, the less the younger woman took an older man’s cheating

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