As someone who covers the Trump White House daily, I’m having a hard time figuring out what I think of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. On the one hand, the book is full of suggestions and half-truths that Wolff treats as fact. That might be forgiven if the author were writing a gossipy exposé—except Wolff presents his book as a reported work of journalism, based on hours of interviews with key players in the Trump administration that he got by being given free range to roam around the White House.
The obvious reliance on one particular source with a particular axe to grind, Steve Bannon, hurts the book’s credibility. So do the errors, both in facts (Wolff writes that John Boehner was forced out of the House speaker’s office in 2011, the year the Ohio Republican was actually elected speaker) and in analysis (he casually and ignorantly notes that current speaker Paul Ryan “cared . . . little about the issue” of health care when Medicare reform has long been a core element of his political agenda).
There’s a nagging question of the veracity of many of the quotations that give the book its fly-on-the-wall narrative. Wolff claims he has recordings of his interviews with White House officials, and while many of the quotations from Bannon have not been disputed, former deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh has told other journalists she did not say what Wolff quotes her saying. One official who was interviewed at the White House once told me that Wolff did not appear to write down or audio record the conversations. Read more... |
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One More Thing—Among the details that did not ring true in Wolff’s book is his assessment of 32-year-old Stephen Miller, Trump’s speechwriter and policy adviser. “He was supposed to be a policy adviser but knew little about policy,” Wolff writes. That’s just not true of Miller, who I got to know when he worked for Jeff Sessions in the Senate. Despite his youth, Miller was more knowledgeable about immigration policy than just about anyone else on Capitol Hill.
So it was a little disappointing, though not surprising, to see Miller’s now infamous interview Sunday with CNN’s Jake Tapper. Asked about a few of the claims Wolff makes, Miller filibustered with over-the-top praise for Trump as a “genius” and denunciation of Steve Bannon. Miller repeated talking points about the book’s “grotesque” falsehoods and redirected the questions to criticize CNN. Tapper shot back that Miller was being “obsequious” and performing for an “audience of one” (namely, President Trump) and actually cut the interview short. |
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Trump Tweets of the Day
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While spending the weekend at Camp David discussing legislative strategy with Republican lawmakers, President Trump emerged on Saturday with a stern immigration message for Democrats: He wants to find compromise on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but he won’t strike a deal that doesn’t involve funding for his signature border wall.
“The wall is going to happen or we’re not going to have DACA,” Trump told reporters. “We all want DACA to happen. But we also want great security for our country.”
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the Trump administration is requesting nearly $18 billion in 2018 to construct more than 700 miles of new barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. Read more... |
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Interview of the Day—In the new issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Adam Rubenstein interviews Israeli man of letters Hillel Halkin. Here’s an excerpt: Halkin and I recently met at a café, upscale by Israeli standards, in Zichron Ya’akov, the village in which he has lived 45 of his 47 Israeli years. He moved to Israel from the United States in 1970, when he was 31, with his wife Marcia. Dressed casually in a T-shirt, jeans, sandals, and a blue hat to shade from the Levantine sun, Halkin sat across from me at a table on the stone patio. When he ordered a glass of Merlot, the waitress asked (in Hebrew) whether he wanted the expensive one or the cheap one. Halkin inquired as to the difference in price, but the waitress didn’t know and went to check. She came back, informed us of the costs, which differed by around 20 shekels, but said she only had the more expensive one. “Fine,” said Halkin, “but pour a little extra in my glass.” He explained that in Israel, he “feels free to connect to people in that way,” but “in any other country I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that. The flip side is the Israeli rudeness everyone is always complaining about, but rudeness and closeness are two different forms of the same thing.” When his wine came, he commented to me that she added nothing extra to his glass. |
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Photo of the Day
 Donald Trump gives a thumbs-up as he walks from Marine One upon arrival on the South Lawn of the White House on January 7, 2018, after spending the weekend at Camp David. (SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images) |
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Infrastructure Watch—Trump and congressional Republicans also discussed plans this weekend to pass legislation intended to rebuild America’s infrastructure, a major campaign promise that the president hopes to tackle this year after repeatedly pushing it back in 2017.
But despite Trump’s keen interest in resurrecting the infrastructure issue, his administration is not sure what kind of bill they’re going to push. Read more... |
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