While Fire and Fury is not exactly a favourite book of mine, I cannot ignore the enormity of what it portrays. In a general sense, Michael Wolff doesn’t really expose anything new: we already new what Donald Trump is like, and controversy has beset his presidency from the start. What Wolff does very well, though, is put plenty of flesh on that feeling, revealing details that complete the picture of a President that behaves like a spoilt child and an increasingly chaotic and self-serving White House complement that seeks to protect Trump from his own impetuousness in a bid to save itself.
Objectively, it is difficult to confirm whether Wolff’s verbatim quotes and vivid descriptions of meetings, telephone calls and even heated altercations is factually correct. However, that hardly matters: there is enough evidence to sustain the overall picture. And it is a very grim one. It would have been comical only if it didn’t concern the world’s arguably most powerful politician. After reading Wolff’s book any news piece about Trump and his staff that I read (and there’s at least one daily) falls neatly into the same narrative. It is as if the book continues.