Recommended reads

[random new yorker]

Fire and Fury. Inside the Trump White House.
By Michael Wolff.

First published in the United States in 2018 by Henry Holt and Company
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Little, Brown
Copyright © 2018 by Michael Wolff
The moral right of the author has been asserted.

---------------

AUTHORS NOTE

The reason to write this book could not be more obvious. 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. As the day
approached, I set out to tell this story in as contemporaneous a fashion as
possible, and to try to see life in the Trump White House through the eyes of the
people closest to it.

This was originally conceived as an account of the Trump administration’s
first hundred days, that most traditional marker of a presidency. But events
barreled on without natural pause for more than two hundred days, the curtain
coming down on the first act of Trump’s presidency only with the appointment
of retired general John Kelly as the chief of staff in late July and the exit of chief
strategist Stephen K. Bannon three weeks later.

The events I’ve described in these pages are based on conversations that took
place over a period of eighteen months with the president, with most members of
his senior staff—some of whom talked to me dozens of times—and with many
people who they in turn spoke to. The first interview occurred well before I
could have imagined a Trump White House, much less a book about it, in late
May 2016 at Trump’s home in Beverly Hills—the then candidate polishing off a
pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla as he happily and idly opined about a range of
topics while his aides, Hope Hicks, Corey Lewandowski, and Jared Kushner,
went in and out of the room. Conversations with members of the campaign’s
team continued through the Republican Convention in Cleveland, when it was
still hardly possible to conceive of Trump’s election. They moved on to Trump
Tower with a voluble Steve Bannon—before the election, when he still seemed
like an entertaining oddity, and later, after the election, when he seemed like a
miracle worker.

Shortly after January 20, I took up something like a semipermanent seat on a
couch in the West Wing. Since then I have conducted more than two hundred
interviews.

(...)

For whatever reason, almost everyone I contacted—senior members of the
White House staff as well as dedicated observers of it—shared large amounts of
time with me and went to great effort to help shed light on the unique nature of
life inside the Trump White House. In the end, what I witnessed, and what this
book is about, is a group of people who have struggled, each in their own way,
to come to terms with the meaning of working for Donald Trump.
I owe them an enormous debt.

[random new yorker]

in Fire and Fury. Inside the Trump White House.
By Michael Wolff.


PROLOGUE: AILES AND BANNON

The evening began at six-thirty, but Steve Bannon, suddenly among the
world’s most powerful men and now less and less mindful of time
constraints, was late.

Bannon had promised to come to this small dinner arranged by mutual
friends in a Greenwich Village town house to see Roger Ailes, the former head
of Fox News and the most significant figure in right-wing media and Bannon’s
sometime mentor. The next day, January 4, 2017—little more than two weeks
before the inauguration of his friend Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president—
Ailes would be heading to Palm Beach, into a forced, but he hoped temporary,
retirement.

(...)

* * *

(...)

* * *

“Does he get it?” asked Ailes suddenly, pausing and looking intently at Bannon.
He meant did Trump get it. This seemed to be a question about the right-wing
agenda: Did the playboy billionaire really get the workingman populist cause?
But it was possibly a point-blank question about the nature of power itself. Did
Trump get where history had put him?

Bannon took a sip of water. “He gets it,” said Bannon, after hesitating for
perhaps a beat too long. “Or he gets what he gets.”

With a sideways look, Ailes continued to stare him down, as though waiting
for Bannon to show more of his cards.

“Really,” Bannon said. “He’s on the program. It’s his program.” Pivoting
from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one
we’re moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all in. Sheldon”—
Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, far-right Israel defender, and Trump
supporter—“is all in. We know where we’re heading on this.”
“Does Donald know?” asked a skeptical Ailes.
Bannon smiled—as though almost with a wink—and continued:
“Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it.
Or sink trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared
to death of Persia . . . Yemen, Sinai, Libya . . . this thing is bad. . . . That’s why
Russia is so key. . . . Is Russia that bad? They’re bad guys. But the world is full
of bad guys.”

Bannon offered all this with something like ebullience—a man remaking the
world.

“But it’s good to know the bad guys are the bad guys,” said Ailes, pushing
Bannon. “Donald may not know.”

The real enemy, said an on-point Bannon, careful not to defend Trump too
much or to dis him at all, was China. China was the first front in a new cold war.
And it had all been misunderstood in the Obama years—what we thought we
understood we didn’t understand at all. That was the failure of American
intelligence. “I think Comey is a third-rate guy. I think Brennan is a second-rate
guy,” Bannon said, dismissing the FBI director and the CIA director.

“The White House right now is like Johnson’s White House in 1968. Susan
Rice”—Obama’s National Security Advisor—“is running the campaign against
ISIS as a National Security Advisor. They’re picking the targets, she’s picking
the drone strikes. I mean, they’re running the war with just as much
effectiveness as Johnson in sixty-eight. The Pentagon is totally disengaged from
the whole thing. Intel services are disengaged from the whole thing. The media
has let Obama off the hook. Take the ideology away from it, this is complete
amateur hour. I don’t know what Obama does. Nobody on Capitol Hill knows
him, no business guys know him—what has he accomplished, what does he do?”
“Where’s Donald on this?” asked Ailes, now with the clear implication that
Bannon was far out ahead of his benefactor.
“He’s totally on board.”
“Focused?”
“He buys it.”
“I wouldn’t give Donald too much to think about,” said an amused Ailes.
Bannon snorted. “Too much, too little—doesn’t necessarily change things.”

* * *

“What has he gotten himself into with the Russians?” pressed Ailes.
“Mostly,” said Bannon, “he went to Russia and he thought he was going to
meet Putin. But Putin couldn’t give a **** about him. So he’s kept trying.”

“He’s Donald,” said Ailes.
“It’s a magnificent thing,” said Bannon, who had taken to regarding Trump
as something like a natural wonder, beyond explanation.
Again, as though setting the issue of Trump aside—merely a large and
peculiar presence to both be thankful for and to have to abide—Bannon, in the
role he had conceived for himself, the auteur of the Trump presidency, charged
forward:
“China’s everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we
don’t get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi
Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most
rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like
Germany in the thirties. You’re going to have a hypernationalist state, and once
that happens you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

“Donald might not be Nixon in China,” said Ailes, deadpan, suggesting that
for Trump to seize the mantle of global transformation might strain credulity.
Bannon smiled. “Bannon in China,” he said, with both remarkable
grandiosity and wry self-deprecation.

“How’s the kid?” asked Ailes, referring to Trump’s son-in-law and
paramount political adviser, thirty-six-year-old Jared Kushner.

“He’s my partner,” said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise,
he was nevertheless determined to stay on message.
“Really?” said a dubious Ailes.
“He’s on the team.”
“He’s had lot of lunches with Rupert.”
“In fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” Bannon then spent
several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch. Ailes, since his
ouster from Fox, had become only more bitter towards Murdoch. Now Murdoch
was frequently jawboning the president-elect and encouraging him toward
establishment moderation—all a strange inversion in the ever-stranger currents
of American conservatism. Bannon wanted Ailes to suggest to Trump, a man
whose many neuroses included a horror of forgetfulness or senility, that
Murdoch might be losing it.

“I’ll call him,” said Ailes. “But Trump would jump through hoops for Rupert.
Like for Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about who’s jerking whose
chain.”

The older right-wing media wizard and the younger (though not by all that
much) continued on to the other guests’ satisfaction until twelve-thirty, the older
trying to see through to the new national enigma that was Trump—although
Ailes would say that in fact Trump’s behavior was ever predictable—and the
younger seemingly determined not to spoil his own moment of destiny.
“Donald Trump has got it. He’s Trump, but he’s got it. Trump is Trump,”
affirmed Bannon.

“Yeah, he’s Trump,” said Ailes, with something like incredulity.

[random new yorker]

1. ELECTION DAY

In the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway—Donald
Trump’s campaign manager and a central, indeed starring, personality of
Trumpworld—settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the
last weeks of the race, the Trump campaign headquarters had remained a listless
place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few
posters with right-wing slogans.

(...)

That was the first part of Conway’s spin. The other part was that despite
everything, the campaign had really clawed its way back from the abyss. A
severely underresourced team with, practically speaking, the worst candidate in
modern political history—Conway offered either an eye-rolling pantomime
whenever Trump’s name was mentioned, or a dead stare—had actually done
extraordinarily well. Conway, who had never been involved in a national
campaign, and who, before Trump, ran a small-time, down-ballot polling firm,
understood full well that, post-campaign, she would now be one of the leading
conservative voices on cable news.

In fact, one of the Trump campaign pollsters, John McLaughlin, had begun to
suggest within the past week or so that some key state numbers, heretofore
dismal, might actually be changing to Trump’s advantage. But neither Conway
nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law Jared Kushner—the effective head of the
campaign, or the designated family monitor of it—wavered in their certainty:
their unexpected adventure would soon be over.

Only Steve Bannon, in his odd-man view, insisted the numbers would break
in their favor. But this being Bannon’s view—crazy Steve—it was quite the
opposite of being a reassuring one.

(...)

“I can be the most famous man in the world,” Trump told his on-again, offagain
aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the campaign.
“But do you want to be president?” Nunberg asked (a qualitatively different
question than the usual existential candidate test: “Why do you want to be
president?”). Nunberg did not get an answer.
The point was, there didn’t need to be an answer because he wasn’t going to
be president.

Trump’s longtime friend Roger Ailes liked to say that if you wanted a career
in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was
floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future.
He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more
powerful brand and untold opportunities. “This is bigger than I ever dreamed
of,” he told Ailes in a conversation a week before the election. “I don’t think
about losing because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.” What’s more, he was
already laying down his public response to losing the election: It was stolen!
Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose
with fire and fury. They were not ready to win.

* * *

In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win.
And you probably can’t win unless you believe that you will win—except in the
Trump campaign.

The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and
how everybody involved in it was a loser. He was equally convinced that the
Clinton people were brilliant winners—“They’ve got the best and we’ve got the
worst,” he frequently said. Time spent with Trump on the campaign plane was
often an epic dissing experience: everybody around him was an idiot.
Corey Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s first more or less official
campaign manager, was often berated by the candidate. For months Trump
called him “the worst,” and in June 2016 he was finally fired. Ever after, Trump
proclaimed his campaign doomed without Lewandowski. “We’re all losers,” he
would say. “All our guys are terrible, nobody knows what they’re doing. . . .
Wish Corey was back.” Trump quickly soured on his second campaign manager,
Paul Manafort, as well.

By August, trailing Clinton by 12 to 17 points and facing a daily firestorm of
eviscerating press, Trump couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for
achieving an electoral victory. At this dire moment, Trump in some essential
sense sold his losing campaign. The right-wing billionaire Bob Mercer, a Ted
Cruz backer, had shifted his support to Trump with a $5 million infusion.
Believing the campaign was cratering, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah took a
helicopter from their Long Island estate out to a scheduled fundraiser—with
other potential donors bailing by the second—at New York Jets owner and
Johnson & Johnson heir Woody Johnson’s summer house in the Hamptons.

Trump had no real relationship with either father or daughter. He’d had only
a few conversations with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables;
Rebekah Mercer’s entire history with Trump consisted of a selfie taken with him
at Trump Tower. But when the Mercers presented their plan to take over the
campaign and install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway,
Trump didn’t resist. He only expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone
would want to do that. “This thing,” he told the Mercers, “is so fucked up.”
By every meaningful indicator, something greater than even a sense of doom
shadowed what Steve Bannon called “the broke-dick campaign”—a sense of
structural impossibility.

(...)

Even as Trump eliminated the sixteen other Republican candidates, however
far-fetched that might have seemed, it did not make the ultimate goal of winning
the presidency any less preposterous.

And if, during the fall, winning seemed slightly more plausible, that
evaporated with the Billy Bush affair. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—
I just start kissing them,” Trump told the NBC host Billy Bush on an open mic,
amid the ongoing national debate about sexual harassment. “It’s like a magnet.
Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can
do anything. . . . Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

It was an operatic unraveling. So mortifying was this development that when
Reince Priebus, the RNC head, was called to New York from Washington for an
emergency meeting at Trump Tower, he couldn’t bring himself to leave Penn
Station. It took two hours for the Trump team to coax him across town.
“Bro,” said a desperate Bannon, cajoling Priebus on the phone, “I may never
see you again after today, but you gotta come to this building and you gotta walk
through the front door.”

[random new yorker]

1. ELECTION DAY (cont'd)

* * *

The silver lining of the ignominy Melania Trump had to endure after the Billy
Bush tape was that now there was no way her husband could become president.
Donald Trump’s marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him—
or it was, anyway, for those without private jets and many homes. He and
Melania spent relatively little time together. They could go days at a time
without contact, even when they were both in Trump Tower. Often she did not
know where he was, or take much notice of that fact. Her husband moved
between residences as he would move between rooms. Along with knowing little
about his whereabouts, she knew little about his business, and took at best
modest interest in it. An absentee father for his first four children, Trump was
even more absent for his fifth, Barron, his son with Melania. Now on his third
marriage, he told friends he thought he had finally perfected the art: live and let
live—“Do your own thing.”

He was a notorious womanizer, and during the campaign became possibly the
world’s most famous masher. While nobody would ever say Trump was
sensitive when it came to women, he had many views about how to get along
with them, including a theory he discussed with friends about how the more
years between an older man and a younger woman, the less the younger woman
took an older man’s cheating personally.

(...)

Many candidates for president have made a virtue of being Washington
outsiders; in practice, this strategy merely favors governors over senators. Every
serious candidate, no matter how much he or she disses Washington, relies on
Beltway insiders for counsel and support. But with Trump, hardly a person in his
innermost circle had ever worked in politics at the national level—his closest
advisers had not worked in politics at all. Throughout his life, Trump had few
close friends of any kind, but when he began his campaign for president he had
almost no friends in politics. The only two actual politicians with whom Trump
was close were Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, and both men were in their
own way peculiar and isolated. And to say that he knew nothing—nothing at all
—about the basic intellectual foundations of the job was a comic
understatement. Early in the campaign, in a Producers-worthy scene, Sam
Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate: “I got as far as the
Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are
rolling back in his head.”

(...)

Modern politicians and their staffs perform their most consequential piece of
opposition research on themselves. If the Trump team had vetted their candidate,
they would have reasonably concluded that heightened ethical scrutiny could
easily put them in jeopardy. But Trump pointedly performed no such effort.
Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political adviser, explained to Steve Bannon that
Trump’s psychic makeup made it impossible for him to take such a close look at
himself. Nor could he tolerate knowing that somebody else would then know a
lot about him—and therefore have something over him. And anyway, why take
such a close and potentially threatening look, because what were the chances of
winning?

Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his business deals and
real estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why
should he if he wasn’t going to win?

What’s more, Trump refused to spend any time considering, however
hypothetically, transition matters, saying it was “bad luck”—but really meaning
it was a waste of time. Nor would he even remotely contemplate the issue of his
holdings and conflicts.

He wasn’t going to win! Or losing was winning.
Trump would be the most famous man in the world—a martyr to crooked
Hillary Clinton.

His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would have transformed
themselves from relatively obscure rich kids into international celebrities and
brand ambassadors.

Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the Tea Party movement.
Kellyanne Conway would be a cable news star.

Reince Priebus and Katie Walsh would get their Republican Party back.
Melania Trump could return to inconspicuously lunching.

That was the trouble-free outcome they awaited on November 8, 2016.
Losing would work out for everybody.

Shortly after eight o’clock that evening, when the unexpected trend—Trump
might actually win—seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or
DJT, as he called him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania, to whom
Donald Trump had made his solemn guarantee, was in tears—and not of joy.

There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not
unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump
and then into a quite horrified Trump. But still to come was the final
transformation: suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he
deserved to be and was wholly capable of being the president of the United
States.

[Saoirse go Deo]

RNY please do not post any more lengthy extracts from the book as that may result in a copyright issue.

I'm currently reading the book at the moment and have found it interesting so far... Although I find the author is quite 'imaginative' with his reconstructions of conversations.

[random new yorker]

RNY please do not post any more lengthy extracts from the book as that may result in a copyright issue.

I'm currently reading the book at the moment and have found it interesting so far... Although I find the author is quite 'imaginative' with his reconstructions of conversations.

I dont think it will be a copyright problem cos the eBook is flying into everyone's mailboxes ... I think it is part of their marketing campaign

so far, i have published here what i read and have not read anything yet that I did not read in other sources at the time.

(I won't post any more of the book - that everyone should read - unless i or someone else can confirm the Copyright issue)

[random new yorker]

Chapters 2-22 of Fire and Fury have new material (not published elsewhere) so I will be careful to post only a few captions per Chapter.

@Saoirse: let me know if you think the excerpt of Chapter 2 below is too much.

[random new yorker]

Chapter 2. TRUMP TOWER.

(excerpt from 20 pages of text)

On the Saturday after the election, Donald Trump received a small group of
well-wishers in his triplex apartment in Trump Tower.

(...)

Few people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was almost his
appeal: he was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul.

(...)

Indeed, while everybody in his rich-guy social circle knew about his
wide-ranging ignorance—Trump, the businessman, could not even read a
balance sheet, and Trump, who had campaigned on his deal-making skills, was,
with his inattention to details, a terrible negotiator—they yet found him
somehow instinctive. That was the word. He was a force of personality. He could
make you believe.

(...)



Trump, trying to move in on his friend’s date, urged a stop in
Atlantic City. He would provide a tour of his casino. His friend assured the
model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City. It was a place overrun
by white trash.

“What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model.
“They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.”

(...)

It was something of an outlaw prescription for winning — and winning, however you
won, was what it was all about.

Or, as his friends would observe, mindful themselves not to be taken in, he
simply had no scruples.

What was, to many of the people who knew Trump well, much more
confounding was that he had managed to win this election, and arrive at this
ultimate accomplishment, wholly lacking what in some obvious sense must be
the main requirement of the job, what neuroscientists would call executive
function. .. On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.

(...)

Donald Trump might not know what he didn’t know,
but he knew Tom Barrack knew. He would run the business and Trump would
sell the product—making American great again. #MAGA.

(...)

Bannon described Trump as a simple machine. The On switch was full of
flattery, the Off switch full of calumny. The flattery was dripping, slavish, cast
in ultimate superlatives, and entirely disconnected from reality: so-and-so was
the best, the most incredible, the ne plus ultra, the eternal. The calumny was
angry, bitter, resentful, ever a casting out and closing of the iron door.

This was the nature of Trump’s particular salesmanship. His strategic belief
was that there was no reason not to heap excessive puffery on a prospect. But if
the prospect was ruled out as a buyer, there was no reason not to heap scorn and
lawsuits on him or her. After all, if they don’t respond to sucking up, they might
respond to piling on. Bannon felt — perhaps with overconfidence — that Trump
could be easily switched on and off.

[jmcc]

I dont think it will be a copyright problem cos the eBook is flying into everyone's mailboxes ... I think it is part of their marketing campaign

Good luck with that defence. Fair use (typically as part of a review) is one thing but that does not extend to posting the book or complete chapters of the book. Going beyond fair use for review purposes puts both you and the site at risk.

Regards...jmcc

[Saoirse go Deo]

Chapters 2-22 of Fire and Fury have new material (not published elsewhere) so I will be careful to post only a few captions per Chapter.

@Saoirse: let me know if you think the excerpt of Chapter 2 below is too much.

I'm afraid it is too much... People can just get the book. I'd suggest posting links to news articles about any revelations

[random new yorker]

Good luck with that defence. Fair use (typically as part of a review) is one thing but that does not extend to posting the book or complete chapters of the book. Going beyond fair use for review purposes puts both you and the site at risk.

Regards...jmcc

Putting this site at risk of being sued by the publisher Little, Brown?

LOL

imagine how much exposure would getting sued by LB would do to this site?

but yea I agree, i'll go upthread and edit out chunks of the Prologue and Election day.

[random new yorker]

I'm afraid it is too much... People can just get the book. I'd suggest posting links to news articles about any revelations

sounds good

[Fraxinus]

Two excellent books on medieval Ireland I got recently;

Paul McCotter's Medieval Ireland: Territorial, Political and Economic Divisions.
This is a great piece of research into the Trícha Cét Gaelic land and clan based division, which also explains the Bally or Baile system and how we have our townlands today.

Matthew Stout's Early Medieval Ireland 431-1169.
This is a brilliant introduction into Medieval Irish history with fascinating maps and photos. Covers everything from church formation to the development of the different regional dynasties.