The
just-released book about Donald Trump and his dysfunctional presidency
(Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House) has left much of
Washington reeling. Despite the White House’s constitutionally dubious
threat to try to quash the book, the publication date was moved up four
days. But the bulk of Fire and Fury’s disclosures, though deeply
disquieting, aren’t all that surprising.
It’s not yet clear how
Michael Wolff, the book’s controversial author, obtained some of his
information, but it must be assumed that he taped many of his
interviews, particularly those used for the long conversations found
throughout the book. What Wolff has achieved is to get attributed quotes
from high officials about how the president functions, or doesn’t.
But
the book mostly tells us what most of political-journalistic Washington
already knew: that Trump is unqualified to be president and that his
White House is a high-risk area of inexperienced aides. The only
surprise is that more calamities haven’t occurred – at least not yet.
A
good portion of what was released before the book’s publication
concerns a battle between two of the most talkative, argumentative,
self-regarding braggarts US politics has ever seen: Trump and his
one-time chief strategist, Stephen Bannon. In the summer of 2016, with
his campaign lacking a leader, Trump made Bannon – a scruffy, scrappy
former businessman who was then the executive chair of Breitbart News, a
website preaching white nationalism – the campaign’s chief executive.
Bannon was full of big ideas about what a right-wing “populist” campaign
would look like.
In many ways, however, Bannon’s ideal campaign
closely resembled what Trump was already saying and doing: appealing to
blue-collar workers by attacking immigration – for example, saying that
he’d build “a big, beautiful wall” along the border with Mexico, for
which the Mexicans would pay – and trade agreements that Trump alleged
were unfair to the US. These voters came to form the core of Trump’s
base, and his success in wooing them, combined with Hillary Clinton’s
stunning failure to do so, goes a long way toward explaining why he is
president and she is not.
The problem for Trump is that the citizens
he was wooing have never added up to a near-majority of voters. His
famous “base” is well under 40% of the public. But Trump and Bannon
apparently preferred not to think about that.
Trump is prone to
taking out his frustrations on others – he is never to blame for his
failures – and inevitably these landed on Bannon, who bragged more than
was good for him about his power in the White House and asserted more
than he should have. Bannon was ousted from the administration and left
in August. Though he and Trump stayed in touch, in retrospect, an
eventual falling out seems to have been inevitable.
Trump and Bannon
were like two overweight men trying to share a single sleeping bag.
Their political world wasn’t big enough for both. They disagreed
bitterly over whom to back in the race to fill a Senate seat from
Alabama; but, at Bannon’s urging, Trump ultimately backed the erratic
former state Supreme Court judge Roy Moore, who’d been removed from the
bench twice, and who lost the race. Bannon was seeking to shake up the
Republican “establishment” by backing similar “outsider” candidates in
this year’s midterm elections, which, if successful, could make it all
the harder for Trump to obtain victories in Congress.
Despite his
denials, it was Trump who more or less agreed to allow Wolff, whose
reputation for slashing his subjects Trump presumably would have known
from his years in New York City, to interview the White House staff for a
book. Some aides say they believed they were talking to Wolff “off the
record,” meaning that they wouldn’t be publicly associated with their
remarks. But, even if that were true, it was hardly soothing to a
furious president: they had said these things.
In Trump’s view,
Bannon’s great sin with regard to Wolff’s book was to say highly
negative things about the president’s family. Trump was particularly
infuriated by Bannon’s description of a now-famous meeting that his son,
Donald Jr., and other senior campaign staff held in Trump Tower in June
2016 with some Russians who said that they had “dirt” on Hillary
Clinton. Bannon told Wolff that the meeting was “treasonous.” But,
depending on what actually transpired in that meeting, Bannon might not
have been so far off. (Trump himself participated in a meeting aboard
Air Force One, as he returned from his second presidential trip abroad,
to draft a statement to cover up what happened in that Trump Tower
meeting.)
Trump was also reportedly furious that Bannon had described
the president’s favourite child, Ivanka, as “dumb as a brick.” Wolff
also reports that Ivanka and her husband, White House senior adviser
Jared Kushner, had agreed that after their expected smashing success at
the White House, it would be Ivanka who would run for president.
Overstating
matters, as is his wont, Trump claimed, in effect, that Bannon had
nothing to do with his election victory, and that the two had almost
never talked one on one. And, as is his wont, Trump threatened to sue
Bannon. Trump has a long track record of threatening lawsuits without
ever filing them, but even the threat can be costly to the putative
target.
Yet the momentary obsession with the feuding within the Trump
camp shouldn’t obscure other realities. Behind the drama, Trump has
certain clear goals, and cabinet and agency heads who share them – and
who don’t get distracted by the publication of a juicy account of the
president’s behaviour.
While much of Washington and its press corps
were discussing the latest revelations, the Department of Justice, which
is supposed to be somewhat independent of the White House, was being
turned into a partisan instrument for pursuing the president’s grudges.
Indeed, last week, it was disclosed that the DoJ was reopening an
investigation into the already thoroughly investigated matter of Hillary
Clinton’s e-mails. The FBI, it was also disclosed, would be looking
into the Clinton Foundation.
The use of a government agency to
punish a president’s previous opponent recalls the behaviour for which
Richard Nixon was impeached, and suggests a very different form of
government than a democratic one. – Project Syndicate
* Elizabeth
Drew is a contributing editor to The New Republic and the author, most
recently, of Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s
Downfall.
Stephen Bannon