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Key insights from
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White
House
By
Michael Wolff
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What you’ll learn
If you were a fly on the wall of the Trump White House, what
would you see? Journalist Michael Wolff had that singular opportunity, and
gives us a window into what it is like working for Trump both on the
campaign trail and during his first year in office. In Fire and Fury,
Wolff divulges scene after scene of dysfunction, power plays, and PR
disasters, relying on both first-hand observations and scores of interviews
with White House staffers.
Read on for key insights from Fire and Fury.
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1. No one was more
surprised by the Trump victory than Trump himself.
Even in the several months leading up to the election, the
Trump campaign headquarters at Trump Tower was a rather uninspiring sight.
It was not filled with enthusiastic supporters eager and optimistic to see
Trump as commander-in-chief, as one might expect. Even among Trump’s
campaign managers, the widespread assumption was that Trump would not—and
perhaps should not—become president.
A basic confidence in one’s ability to win an election is
usually critical to a candidate’s success, but Trump himself didn’t think
he could pull off a win against Hillary. He was often comparing his sub-par
team to Clinton’s all-star squad, discounting the possibility they had any
real chance.
Trump’s wife, Melania, was one of the early believers that
Trump could win, but the prospect worried her. She got a foretaste of what
a Trump presidency would mean for her when the New York Post got
ahold of some photos of a nude Melania from when she was a young model. She
preferred the sheltered, quiet existence to the harsh, unmerciful political
limelight—but Trump consoled Melania with the guarantee that the unwanted
media attention would cease in November.
Because Trump and his team did not expect to win, they did
not feel obligated to modify their behavior or attitudes. Trump was unteachable
even though he knew little of history and politics, and he was convinced
that he was surrounded by losers and idiots who bore responsibility for his
lagging numbers. Political aide Sam Nunberg recalled an exchange in which
he tried to teach Trump about the Constitution. He made it to the Fourth
Amendment when Trump became impatient and began rolling his eyes.
It seemed like everyone involved was going to be happier
when the election was over: Trump would get the fame he wanted and be able
to blame his loss on a wily, wicked Hillary; Melania would return to a
normal, quiet life away from unwanted media attention; Campaign manager
Kellyanne Conway and others would land jobs with cable news; the Republican
National Convention would be free from the maverick who enjoyed rocking the
establishment boat.
To the tearful disappointment of Melania and the shock and
horror of Trump, however, Donald Trump won the presidency.
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2. From the
outset, Trump had a strained relationship with the intelligence community
and an obvious disregard for the truth.
Trump took a line out of the liberal playbook when he
consistently lambasted the intelligence community. In a strange twist,
liberals and the intelligence community were aligned in their horror of
Trump’s criticism. Through Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, an unofficial
liaison and buffer between Trump and the seasoned conservative politicians
and elites, the establishment Republicans warned Trump that it is the
kabal-esque “deep state” operating in the shadow of the U.S. Intelligence’s
wings that really holds the reins.
Trump’s son-in-law Kushner became the liaison between Trump
and the Republican establishment. One of the mainstays of the republican
establishment is the intelligence community. Whether Trump realized it or
not, he was on thin ice, and it wouldn’t bear the weight of criticism much
longer. As the GOP godfathers would tell Kushner, the intelligence
community is a large sleeping dog that Trump needs to stop poking and
jabbing, or he would have to deal with a slew of new stories getting leaked
to the press. Thus Kushner made mollifying the situation with the CIA a top
priority for the new administration.
Trump’s inaugural address reverberated with Steve Bannon’s
typical bellicose bravado. It was full of warnings to enemies that things
would be changing in Washington. Given Trump’s frequent incendiary
comments, it might surprise some to learn that Trump deeply desires the
approval of others, which made the idea of keeping some people at arm’s
length instead of schmoozing them a difficult one. Bannon reminded Trump
that there was war on. Trump needed to hit back at the opposition, but the
narcissistic side of his personality was begging to be liked and admired by
the public and media. Bannon assured Trump that friendships would emerge
along the warpath as he held a hardline.
Trump was disappointed with the lackluster reception from
veteran politicians and the cold shoulder he got from Hollywood at the
inauguration. But his salesman’s spirit of optimism allowed him to reframe
the experience as a win by arguing that the turnout was much bigger than
the media was willing to admit.
Trump showed a penchant for perverting or ignoring the
truth, and a staff that stood by his right to appeal to alternative
facts—or “alternative information” as Kellyanne Conway would later put it.
It seemed to many that Trump was perfectly okay with drawing from a
questionable body of information and dismissing inconvenient facts as he
came across them. He seemed intent on recasting reality to his liking.
People wondered if the slew of angry tweets that, at best, maintained a
loose relationship with reality would continue when the president-elect
became president. The answer was that the new president had no intention of
changing.
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3. Steve Bannon
emerged from a checkered past to become the president’s chief strategist.
Steve Bannon’s modus operandi is plotter and peremptory
striker: know the enemies’ moves before they do. On the day of the
inauguration, he went to the west wing and scoped out his office, asking
that most of the furniture—including the chairs where guests would sit—be
removed. He wouldn’t be entertaining long chats with anyone. He isolated
himself and it seemed he knew better than others in the administration that
there was not just a war against the establishment and the media afoot, but
also a battle for the heart of the White House. He intended to win it.
Bannon had an obscure, spotty career and no experience in
the public sector before becoming the White House’s Chief Strategist.
Everyone wondered how someone could emerge from relative obscurity to
become one of the most influential people in the United States.
From the mid-90s onward, Bannon seemed to make a habit of
joining distressed, floundering, even scandalized companies and making
matters worse instead of better. He was the entrepreneur who never quite
made it. His career was less of entrepreneur and more that of an
opportunist eager to separate rich idiots from their money.
He was introduced to billionaire Robert Mercer at the
screening of a documentary about Reagan standing up to the Soviets. Bannon
ingratiated himself with Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah. Through his
connection with Mercer, Bannon took over management of Breitbart News when
Andrew Breitbart died in 2012. Through this position, Bannon became a
familiar name in the Tea Party movement. Trump became the candidate that
Breitbart supported. Trump’s idiosyncrasies, vices, and policy positions
mattered far less than his billions did. Trump was the next rich guy in
whom Bannon saw opportunity.
Between August 15 and January 17, Bannon headed up
operations for the Trump campaign from Trump Tower, rarely leaving the
building for those months. He was witty, intelligent, and pushed the
ultimately successful strategy of appealing to disgruntled working class
whites in swing states.
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4. The Russia
debacle left Trump’s inner circle demoralized and less eager to defend his
outbursts.
No one in the White House wanted to talk about Russia. They
had expected that, like other media-driven hype stories, this story that
the Russians were somehow involved in rigging the presidential election
would blow over—but it didn’t. The public took it seriously and wouldn’t
let it go.
Bannon said it was just another conspiracy with no strong
basis. It became another divisive issue with both sides accusing the other
of buying in to fake news. The media was convinced that something was not
quite right—and quite possibly seriously wrong. Still, evidence had yet to
surface.
In many ways, the Russia question was far more than finding
an answer: it was strength-testing a green administration.
But then news did surface: three different stories came out
on the same day, March 1, suggesting that various members of Trump’s
administration had dealings with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.
The Washington Post reported that the new attorney general, Jeff
Sessions, had met with the ambassador on several occasions, and had lied
about it in his confirmation. The Times story strengthened links
between the Trump campaign and Russia’s interests in swaying results. The New
York Post revealed that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser,
also had connections with the Russians.
Trump’s tweets in response to the stories—maintaining that
Obama himself was responsible for wiretapping his campaign, and that there
was an elaborate plot to bring him down—took a PR disaster from bad to
worse. This deluge was a pivotal moment for the Trump administration; his
team had begun to lose their desire to defend him. Trump continued to
bewilder them, and doing damage control was an exhausting affair.
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5. The Trump White
House is not a happy family—it’s fractured by factions, each competing for
the president’s ear.
In the course of vying for control of Trump’s agenda, Bannon
has made some enemies. Jared and Ivanka Kushner are both advisers to Trump,
a duo presence referred to within the White House—sometimes
not-so-affectionately—as “Jarvanka.” When Jarvanka is not present, their
malefactors will refer to them condescendingly as “the kids,” a jab at
their lack of life experience in general and political experience in
particular. Bannon often insinuated that they care about their own
interests more than Trump’s.
The decision to fire Comey illustrates the tensions between
warring factions within the administration. Jared and Ivanka suggested that
Trump go through with it, and Bannon joined Priebus in the rebuttal—in part
to isolate the couple, no doubt. Jared and Ivanka had their own dog in the
fight: they were concerned that the Kushner family finances were going to
get caught in the webs that the Trump administration firmly believed the
DOJ and FBI were spinning. Bannon maintained that it would smell like
scandal and make the Russia insinuations look like a comparatively small
matter. It appeared that Bannon and Priebus had managed to talk Trump down
from his fire and fury. However, Jared and Ivanka managed to get their
father riled up again and listed the reasons why it would be strategic for
Trump to listen to his initial gut-reaction to fire Comey.
In the end, Jared and Ivanka prevailed. Bannon ruefully
remarked that Trump didn’t realize what the consequences of firing Comey
would be.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Fire and
Fury here. And since we get a commission on
every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.
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