You’ve probably forgotten about Michael Wolff’s Trump expose Fire and Fury as well as the explosive media surge its release caused in January because 10 months in the Trump White House is the equivalent to 10 years in anyone else’s. Personally I was reminded of Fire and Fury by a friend who was reading it on the beach this past August so when I was looking for my next read (besides the dozen or so books currently unread on my bookshelf) I sought out this already outdated publication. How out of date is Fire and Fury? In the single week (10/4 to 10/11) since I finished reading but neglected to write out this review frequently mentioned Hope Hicks (who resigned post publication) started a new job at Fox News and the focus of Wolff’s epilogue, Nikki Haley, resigned her post as UN ambassador.
“With the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, the United States entered the eye of the most extraordinary political storm since at least Watergate.”
Wolff’s time line is essentially inauguration day, January 20, 2017, to Steve Bannon’s White House exit in August. This works out well because the focus is as much on Bannon as it is on Trump with a healthy dose of vitriol towards “JerVanka” and the rest of the bumbling idiots currently “running” the country. The one person who gets mostly left alone is Mike Pence but that seems more because Pence is largely sidelined not because Wolff supports Pence as a VP. Wolff goes pretty hard on the ineptitude of the Trump White House and if you have even the slightest affinity for Trump you’ll probably hate this one but since many Cannonballers are also Pajibians I don’t think that is going to be an issue here.
Unfortunately, like I previously mentioned, it is so out of date that it is hardly informative for someone keeping abreast of the clusterfuck that is our government. I did appreciate how Wolff compared the Trump campaign and subsequent administration to The Producers:
“The Trump campaign had, perhaps less than inadvertently, replicated the scheme from Mel Brooks’s The Producers. In that classic, Brooks’s larcenous and dopey heroes, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, set out to sell more than 100 percent of the ownership stakes in the Broadway show they are producing. Since they will be found out only if the show is a hit, everything about the show is premised on its being a flop. Accordingly, they create a show so outlandish that it actually succeeds, thus dooming our heroes.”