By Michael Wolff. Published by Little, Brown. Reviewed by Ann Hassan

Michael Wolff’s new book on President Donald Trump, Fire and Fury, has been an enormous hit – an immediate bestseller that has dominated news reports since its publication.

The book opens with a dinner party vignette and a brief sketch of the perfect storm that led to Trump being installed in the White House. A global trend away from career politicians and towards isolationist, nationalist protagonists; the strange state of the GOP in the United States, with brewing Tea Party tensions and peculiar personalities finding new prominence; an America left suspicious of the Beltway after the 2007-2008 financial crisis; a scandal-ridden election campaign; and – finally – the hubris of Trump himself who, according to Wolff, ran for the presidency not because he thought he would win or because he even wanted to win, but rather for the limelight which would secure the future of the Trump family as a media powerhouse. If Wolff is right, US voters called Trump’s bluff, installing him in a position he was “horrified” to find he’d won.

Wolff is sometimes hazy about his sources, but the figure who dominates the book is Steve Bannon, right-wing media kingpin and former White House Chief Strategist (a position Trump created for him). Bannon resigned/got the sack (it’s unclear which) in August 2017, but at the time Wolff was interviewing he was as close as anyone to the President. Through Bannon and others we see Trump “at home”: unruly, unteachable, craving attention, a fiend for television. We see his shifting allegiances with various cronies, his ambitious daughter Ivanka (“dumb as a brick”, according to Bannon), son-in-law Jared Kushner (“just kind of flits in”), and a litany of White House aides who are variously outraged, bewildered, disgruntled, shamed. (Incidentally, one of Wolff’s claims is that “Jarvanka” – Bannon’s slighting moniker for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner – harbour their own presidential ambitions.)

Those close to Trump appear to consider him generally incompetent – occasionally incoherent, even – and work to protect him from his own impulses. For Bannon, he is singular in his strangeness – “a natural wonder, beyond explanation” – unable to take advice but susceptible to manipulation, making him the ideal “avatar of Trumpism”. Trump is guided by those he trusts, but fickle and capricious so that being in his trust is an uncertain state. Finally, the whole administration is typified by a decadence not made up of dissipation but rather a gargantuan disregard for the gravity of the job at hand. It is without doubt the strangest presidency we could have imagined.

Fire and Fury would be a wonderfully pleasurable read – full of salacious gossip and far-fetched tales, all fluently told in a smart tabloid style – if only so much of it weren’t true. Instead, it is ultimately quite disturbing: Wolff’s book tells the story of what happens when voters’ distrust of authority leads to one of the most anomic characters on the planet being given the largest dose of it. There must be a lesson to learn in there. 

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 223, February 2018: 28.