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Stewart Myrent
After reading Bob Woodward's "Fear: Trump in the White House", Cliff Sims "Team of Vipers" & Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury; Inside the Trump White House", I thought all three were good representations of reasonably balanced reportage. Ron, I did enjoy "Fire and Fury" the most, even though I thought that his book might be the biggest "hit piece", based on early reporting, but I did not find it to be so. The main thing I got out of Wolff's book, was the bitter battle in the White House between Jared & Ivanka's (Jarvanka's) sphere of influence (with Goldman Sachs former employees) going up against Steve Bannon's "Bannonites", because Jared & Ivanka are basically NY liberal Democrats. Observations from "Fire and Fury", from Chapter 1 "Election Day". Before the election, with Trump's entire campaign expecting him to lose, "He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured (Roger) 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 warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win." From the same chapter, "...Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Comstitution 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.'" From Chapter 9 "CPAC", one of the most interesting chapters in the book, delves into the evolution of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The conference had outgrown the hostelry of D.C. & moved to Gaylord Resort on Maryland's National Harbor waterfront. CPAC, "...had long had an uncomfortable relationship with Trump, viewing him as an unlikely conservative, if not a charlatan. CPAC, too, saw Bannon & Breitbart as practicing an outre conservatism." Further, "CPAC, organized by remnants of the conservative movement after Barry Goldwater's apocalyptic defeat in 1964, had, with stoic indefatigability, turned itself into the backbone of conservative survival and triumph. It had purged John Birchers and the racist right and embraced the philosophic conservative tenets of Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley. In time, it endorsed Reagan-era small government and anti-regulatory reform, and then added the components of the cultural wars - antiabortion, anti-gay-marriage, and a tilt toward evangelicals - and married itself to conservative media, first right-wing radio and later Fox News...Part of the fun of a CPAC conference, which attracted a wide assortment of conservative young people (reliably mocked as the Alex P. Keaton crowd by the growing throng of liberal press that covered the conference), was the learning of the conservative catechism." From Chapter 10 "Goldman", in recounting the arrival of many former Goldman Sachs employees in the Trump White House, specifically Gary Cohn & Dina Powell, who with Jarvanka, mollified & moderated Trump's worst impulses & talking about his inaugural speech on 02/28/17, "'The Goldman speech', Bannon called it. The inaugural, largely written by Bannon and Stephen Miller, had shocked Jared and Ivanka. But a particular peculiarity of the Trump White House, compounding its messaging problems, was its lack of a speech-writing team. There was the literate and highly verbal Bannon, who did not really do any actual writing himself; there was Stephen Miller, who did little more than produce bullet points...Ivanka grabbed firm control of the joint session draft and quickly began pulling in contributions from the Jarvanka camp." Further, "The hours following the president's speech were Trump's best time in the White House. It was, for at least one news cycle, a different presidency. For a moment, there was even something like a crisis of conscience among parts of the media: Had this president been grievously misread? Had the media, the biased media, missed well-intentioned Donald Trump? Was he finally showing his better nature? The president himself spent almost two full days doing nothing but reviewing his good press...It also comfirmed Ivanka's understanding of her father: he just wanted to be loved. And, likewise, it confirmed Bannon's worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a marshmallow." From Chapter 17 "Abroad and at Home", I finally got my question, "When was America last great?" answered. "And, indeed, in the larger Trump view, it was during the cold war that time and circumstances gave the United States its greatest global advantage. That was when America was great." And, finally, from Chapter 18 "Bannon Redux", "This was Bannon's fundamental insight about Trump: he made EVERYTHING personal, and he was helpless not to."
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