A Wolff in wolf’s clothing
Some say “Fire and Fury” has a little tarnish to it. Next to the daycare-center-in-a-garbage-heap administration that is its subject matter, it shines.
Rather than focus on all the stunning bombshells in Wolff’s book, I’ll fixate here on the Washington Post’s modest pushback of Wolff’s methods and accuracy. So let’s say it’s a bit rough around the edges and tilts slightly toward hit piece (although it’s far from a fiction-loosely-based-on-fact “Primary Colors” or conspiratorial “Fahrenheit 911”). This is what Wolff has been doing for two decades.
He is indeed a bit of a provocateur, but Trump + Fox News INVITED him right through the door, thinking that his reporting would end up favorable to the administration. This was idiot move #1.
Idiot move #2 was threatening to sue, thinking that would say “it’s all false, so we need to take legal action.” That’s not how it works. Instead (and this has been Trump M.O. since the early 80's), it says “it’s all true, but we’ll make it seem like it’s false by taking legal action.” Even Trump’s sworn enemy WaPo was scratching their heads over some of this stuff, but Trump just had to tweet and sue, attack and bail, with no substantive leg to stand on. Except I’m a New York hotshot/hot shit playboy with crazy hair and a last name that allows me to brand myself as being rich. It’s just his pathetic nature.
Wolff is a piece of work in the Savannah Guthrie sit-down. I’m looking forward to his inevitable string of new interviews over the next couple days. I’ve read some of Wolff’s stuff and I’m surprised I didn’t think of him and wonder all year why he wasn’t turned loose on Trump before. Now I know where he’s been all this time — right under the Trump administration’s sniveling noses — and as an anti-Trumper, I’m ecstatic. He checks all the boxes: He’s written and reported on politics, media, and technology, has known Trump for years through these genres and their shared home base of New York … and he’s this weird hybrid of asshole and badass. Wolff stands slightly aside from the mainstream media but isn’t a right- or left-wing conspiracy theorist. This unique position allows him to run between the raindrops so to speak, gain more access, report anecdotes more bluntly, fray the details around the edges, and still present what amounts to an overall true story.
Importantly, he was uniquely able to obtain access, then willingly throw his White House pass into a wood chipper, confident that his career would carry on. Drew Magary sums that up pretty well in GQ:
Back to the Guthrie segment, I love his assertion that his credibility is being questioned by “a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on earth.”
(Wolff’s) credibility is being questioned by “a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on earth.”
That statement is indicative of Wolff’s personality and approach, which makes him the tell-all writer all of us have been waiting for, and the one Trump most deserves: You say he stretched the truth a couple times? I wonder where he got the idea to do that to you — you of the 2,000 mistruths, the conspiracy theories, the birther movement — and of “hitting back harder.”
Trump has one in particular of a small handful of attributes I would label as “effective” to his political successes: Branding himself as the everyman hero who simply doesn’t care what the establishment thinks. This is that “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue” routine. Well, Wolff shares a bit of this “tells-it-like-it-is” attitude, and the turnabout results are kind of staggering.
Choose your euphemism. This is called Tasting Your Own Medicine. Take a look in the mirror. Bullshitter vs. bullshitter. Trump has met his match when it comes to giving zero fucks.
