Review: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Shit happens.

I don’t mean that in the evaluative sense, though take it as you will in this political moment. Instead, I mean it in the philosophical. Things take place. They occur. I mean it as a coarse reminder that experience is real.

The challenge is to describe that “shit,” to find language and narrative strategies that accurately reflect experience without turning it into something entirely different. It’s about being “true.”

There’s been a lot of talk in the last year and a half about the difficulties of distinguishing true events from fake ones, but the argument is not as new as we make it sound. Plato’s parable of the cave – his suggestion that all we can see of ultimate reality is the shadows it casts upon a cave wall – is one of the earliest and most enduring articulations of it. The sometimes silly talk about deconstruction that dominated my graduate school years is another in a completely different vein, arguing that language itself is not always as reliable a tool as we want it to be in naming the real.

I wonder, probably belatedly, if the most sustained version of that discussion in recent years hasn’t been the phenomenon of “reality TV.” I’ve never had much patience for the genre – unless you expand reality TV to include sports, in which case I find it riveting – but there’s no question it’s become a major force in reshaping American culture. The “reality” part of it, is undeniably real. You have recordings of people saying and doing things they indisputably said and did.

The “TV” part of it is there as well, of course, but it’s less visible since it’s a matter of selection. The producers pick and choose the excerpts they include, and then they exclude the vast majority of the possibilities. They do so, always, in the service of a central narrative. They want to tell a particular story about a group of individuals, and, in the service of that impression, they leave out most of the possibilities that contradict it.

In almost every case, as I understand it, the central narrative of reality TV (with the possible exception of skills-based reality TV like the later stages of American Idol or America’s Got Talent when only the finalists remain) is that we get the privilege of laughing at the subject in question. No matter how handsome the Bachelor may be, no matter how many beautiful women seem willing to throw themselves at him, he comes across as a too-pleased-with-himself guy undeserving of the love of Bachelorette #7. No matter how many followers a Kardashian sister collects, and no matter how many other celebrities fall into her web, she remains a narcissist not quite clued into the recognition that she’s the punch-line to a joke the show keeps telling and telling.

It’s nothing new to say that Donald Trump is a reality TV president. Yet, that insight lies underneath all the crazy ferment that Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury, is producing. This is a Presidency committed to giving us a reality that it directs. (Other presidencies have done so as well, of course, but never with the same contempt for institutions like the media, the courts, or our intelligence services that can provide a counter-narrative.) Trump’s declared war on the media is ultimately about his frustration that he cannot single-handedly declare what is true and that he lacks the editing power of a TV producer to eliminate the strands of the story that clash with the central narrative he’s pushing.

In essence, Wolff’s book is its own claim to reality, its own “reality chronicle” of the last year or so in politics. Wolff makes a bid for credibility in his “Author’s Note,” when he claims he’s had “more than two hundred interviews” and that he wound up with, thanks to the chaos of the White House, “fly-on-the-wall” access to much of what took place. He is, in so many words, asserting that he had the same kind of authorial perspective that the producers of Jersey Shore or Big Brother would have had. That gave him reams of “footage” he could include or exclude as he wrote. And he’s claiming the authority to show us the “real world” of the White House.

There’s been some pushback about basic factual errors in this work, but I think that misses the point. It’s less concerning to me that he might have confused Michael Berman with Matt Berman, and more concerning to me that everything in this book shares the same purpose, serves the same over-arching narrative: Donald Trump is an individual staggeringly unsuited to be President.

And here’s why that bothers me: I already believe it. I have heard that story from many other sources, and I have found myself telling it from the evidence of his many tweets and public statements.

As a result, as compelling as this book certainly is – as much fun as it is to read that Steve Bannon and many other insiders see Trump in as condescending a light as I do – it’s ultimately somewhat dangerous. The best political writing helps us see a larger political narrative than the one our daily journalism provides. This book confirms and perhaps amplifies what we already think we know.

Reality TV succeeds because it’s addictive, and this book feeds the addiction of the show that is our reality TV president. Trump hates it not so much because he sees it as true or untrue – although he and his supporters have every right to wave its clear mistakes against it – but because it is, in effect, a rival producer’s bid to tell the master narrative of his presidency. He hates it for the same reason he hated Mark Cuban’s Shark Tank – a show that ventured too closely into Apprentice territory – and then he hates it even more for asserting its power to make him a character in that rival show.

He hates it because it revives the claim that for many of us the truth about him is the truth implicit in all reality TV: that the subject is always the joke. I imagine (along with many others) that the real danger of the Trump personality, so wrapped in narcissism as it is, is that he is always almost aware of the degree to which the world outside his shell is laughing at him. He hates this book because it’s such a sustained assault on what he insists is real – his own greatness – and because it makes its case through the tools of the reality TV genre that he has spent so much time manipulating himself.

The book we need right now is one that makes sense of these larger currents, that critiques the reality-TV lens rather than embraces it. We need one that helps not just the philosophers but the people who deal with “the shit” find a way out of the deliberate confusion of the real and the true, one that helps us see our reality more clearly, in all its contradictions, rather than one that offers a version more in line with what many of us are already convinced is true. I wish Wolff, who is often very smart here, were smart enough to write that book. I wish I were smart enough to write it.

There’s certainly some fun in reading this. On the one hand, it’s weird to read the events of the last year as history, to be reminded that, “Oh yeah, he did say all those weird things at the Boy Scout Jamboree” or “Has it really only been six months since Scaramucci?” But all of those conflicts come in chapters organized in general around individual conflicts; they read like episodes of Survivor with each character taking a turn as the central figure in a drama dominated by Trump, Bannon and “Jarvanka.”

As a bottom line, then, this is not the book we need. It is, however, the book that many of us want. I’ve enjoyed reading it – I knocked it off in little more than a day – but I admit I’ve felt as guilty in doing so as I would if I ever caught myself looking at the clock and realizing I’d just spent half an hour listening to Kris Jenner talk about the nature of celebrity.


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