Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is a 2018 book by Michael Wolff which details the behavior of U.S. President Donald Trump and staff of his 2016 presidential campaign and White House. The book highlights unflattering descriptions of Trump's behavior, chaotic interactions among senior White House staff and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. Trump is depicted as being held in low regard by his White House staff, leading Wolff to state that "100% of the people around him" believe Trump is unfit for office.
Many of the most controversial quotes in the book came from Steve Bannon, the chief executive of the Trump campaign in its final months and White House Chief Strategist from January to August 2017. Bannon referred to the meeting during the presidential campaign of Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner with Russian officials as "treasonous" and "unpatriotic", described Ivanka Trump as "dumb as a brick" and referencing the Special Counsel investigation being led by Robert Mueller he said "they're going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV". Bannon also said that Mueller's investigation would likely uncover money laundering involving Kushner from loans received by his family business from Deutsche Bank.
Reviewing the book for CNN, Trump biographer Michael D'Antonio attested that Wolff's overall portrait of Trump accorded with his own understanding and that of others, specifically drawing attention to details concerning Trump's short attention span, issues of misogyny and white supremacism as well as Trump's opinion that "'expertise' is 'overrated'". He added that Wolff's descriptions of the people around Trump present "a credible picture" D'Antonio criticized Wolff's "tabloidy prose", and reminded the reader to treat the book with a degree of skepticism, but concluded that it was "essential reading" that will provide a framework on which future writers may build. D'Antonio also stated: "Some of what Wolff presents is so speculative that his critics, and the President's most ardent defenders, will be able to pick his work apart. These excesses will diminish the book's impact and, ultimately, do a disservice to the historical record".
Speaking on the PBS NewsHour, David Brooks said that because in the past Wolff has been known to not check facts he is "very dubious about accepting everything" in the book. "Nonetheless, the general picture confirms what we already knew. And I think there is a general sense the president is unfit. They treat — they do treat him like a child". Mark Shields agreed and expressed deep concerns that other than Katie Walsh, who briefly worked as deputy chief of staff to Reince Priebus, there did not appear to be any "counteroffensive" in the White House which Shields described as "the political equivalent of the dog not barking in the night", i.e. conspicuously absent.
Reviewing for The Guardian, Matthew d'Ancona, a former commissioner and editor of Wolff's work, stated that the fact that Wolff was admitted to the White House at all indicated significant incompetence within the Trump administration. D'Ancona described Wolff's version of President Trump and his daughter Ivanka as "the world's stupidest King Lear" and a "clueless Cordelia". Warning the reader against distraction by those searching for "minor errors", d'Ancona described Wolff as a "brilliant journalist", who has a "terrier-like pursuit of the truth". He concluded that Wolff had "nailed it", and had "scotched once and for all the nonsensical claim that we should take Trump seriously but not literally".
In a Wall Street Journal review, Barton Swaim sees the book as an unverifiable "gossipy" collection of "every unseemly tidbit he could extract from murmuring White House staffers" written as though he "were the omniscient narrator of a novel". Swaim asserts that the reaction to the book, rather than the book itself, will give reason for it to be historically notable. Axios reporters Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote that there were parts of the book that were "wrong, sloppy, or betray[ed] off-the-record confidence. But there are two things he gets absolutely right". They wrote that Wolff's depiction "of Trump as an emotionally erratic president" was accurate as well as his writing of some White House officials having a "low opinion" of Trump. Andrew Prokop wrote in Vox that "we should interpret the book as a compendium of gossip Wolff heard. A fair amount of it does clearly seem to be accurate". Aaron Blake of The Washington Post wrote that "Wolff seems to have arrived at a stunning amount of incredible conclusions that hundreds of dogged reporters from major newspapers haven't. [...] [I]t's worth evaluating each claim individually and not just taking every scandalous thing said about the White House as gospel".
A review by Mick Brown in The Telegraph described the book as "overheated, sensationalist – and completely true to its subject". David Sexton of the London Evening Standard said the book is a political exposé worth reading and is "destined to become the primary account of the first nine months of the Trump presidency". Writing in the Irish Independent, Darragh McManus noted that Fire and Fury "seems to be the tell-all book that other tell-all books call Supreme Commander".
This is who Trump is: He elevated his political profile by claiming President Barack Obama wasn’t born in America, he announced his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and murderers, and he has continued to disparage nonwhite people since entering the White House.
He isn’t going to change. But his xenophobia, as the leader of the Republican Party, is also making it harder for Congress to figure out a deal to protect the 690,000 people in the United States at risk of losing their DACA protections.
“Shithole” countries, explained
This is what the Washington Post reported to set off this maelstrom: Trump had called some collection of countries with black and Latino people “shitholes,” he said that the United States shouldn’t be accepting more Haitians, and it should instead be bringing more Scandinavian people into the country:
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to countries mentioned by the lawmakers.
Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway, whose prime minister he met with Wednesday. The president, according to a White House official, also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the United States economically.
In addition, the president singled out Haiti, telling lawmakers that immigrants from that country must be left out of any deal, these people said.
“Why do we need more Haitians?” Trump said, according to people familiar with the meeting. “Take them out.”
“Trumpism” is just the politics of white grievance
Political scientists who study race and immigration find that they have played a central role in the transformation of American politics. Democratic support for civil rights legislation and mass Latino immigration led to a sea change in American voting, wherein white voters who feel high levels of racial resentment shifted en masse into the Republican Party.
To understand Trumpism, look to Europe
Trumpism’s closest analogue in other countries is European far-right parties, which have made immigration the core of their political appeal and have found political success. Statistical studies find, consistently and unambiguously, that parties like France’s National Front and Germany’s Alternatives for Deutschland (AfD) derive the bulk of their support by marshaling anti-immigrant sentiment.
This sentiment is created not by a feeling of economic threat, fear that Europeans would have to compete for their jobs, but by a sensation of cultural threat — a sense that people from Muslim countries, places that Trump might term “shitholes,” were alien to Europe and not welcome.
A group of Belgian researchers examined support for a far-right party in their country, Vlaams Blok, at the municipal and national levels. Instead of just looking at the impact of the presence of “immigrants” in a particular area, they looked at different types of immigrants.
Specifically, they separated out immigrants from Turkey and Africa’s Muslim-majority Maghreb region, which includes such countries as Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. They found that the presence of Muslim immigrants correlated well with increased support for Vlaams Blok, but the presence of non-Muslim immigrant populations didn’t.
”It is not so much the presence of foreigners, but rather the fear of the Islamic way of living that leads to extreme right voting,” they write.
The comparison to the European far right parties, which are functionally single-issue parties focusing on immigration, is vital to helping us understand Trumpism. These parties took advantage of European cultural anxiety, of fears of difference, to build entirely new political movements that took Europe by storm.
Trump did much the same thing in the United States. His policy stances on other issues — taxes, health care, North Korea, Syria — shift by the day, often based on whoever he talked to last. He can’t seem to make up his mind on a Trump view of the economy, at least not one he’s consistently acted on, or on a Trump doctrine in foreign policy.
He’s been consistent on only one thing throughout his campaign and in his presidency: mobilizing cultural resentment. From his fight with “Mexican” Judge Gonzalo Curiel (who was born in Indiana) to his battle with the NFL over black players kneeling to protest racism to his willingness to whitewash the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August, divisive racial and cultural politics have been at the center of his appeal. Polling suggests that Trump’s core supporters back him on this stuff to the hilt.
Trumpism is not complicated. It is the weaponization of anti-immigrant and anti-black sentiment to further Donald Trump’s political ambitions. The “shithole” comment is not an exception. It’s the rule.
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